HDR in older phones would have only merged/blended the images resulting in ghosting (the reflections would have shown the woman as having more than two arms) or blurring because they weren't using AI to select and cut out parts of the original image to swap in parts from other images.
The "other photos" weren't older pictures pulled from her photo library, but were the photos taken in quick succession using different exposures. Those are still "other images of the same person" even if they are only temporarily stored in memory, but using them for exposure adjustment isn't a problem. Any old HDR capable phone would have done that. The problem is AI detecting people and deleting them to paste in "better" versions from those other photos. HDR is additive, not destructive.
You really don’t need any kind of fancy AI algorithm to associate different keyframes with different areas of the photo. This could be done using any number of standard computational photography techniques based on straightforward criteria such as exposure, motion blur, etc. etc.
For this reason I’m skeptical of your claim that ‘HDR in older phones would have only merged/blended the images resulting in ghosting…or blurring’. Even if we assume this is true for the sake of argument, you undermine your own point here, as ghosting and blurring are also distortions of reality. You’re apparently ok with a photo showing a person with ‘more than two arms’, but not ok with a photo combining slightly different time-slices of the same scene (which is actually any photo taken using a focal plane shutter above flash sync speed :)). You're entitled to your subjective preference there, but I certainly don't share it myself.
The "other photos" weren't older pictures pulled from her photo library, but were the photos taken in quick succession using different exposures. Those are still "other images of the same person" even if they are only temporarily stored in memory, but using them for exposure adjustment isn't a problem. Any old HDR capable phone would have done that. The problem is AI detecting people and deleting them to paste in "better" versions from those other photos. HDR is additive, not destructive.