[Honor View 20 Questions & Answers] NekoMichi:
So, a bit of a final update - I've gone into stores and tested multiple Huawei devices and can conclude that this isn't a bug but an intentional feature that's not been very well documented by Huawei. It turns out that while Huawei may advertise "AI Photography" on their phones as if it were a single unifying feature across EMUI/Magic UI, there are actually 2 different frameworks that apply to different models of device. Here's a quick summary.

Type A:

- AI picks out scenes and determines a set of enhancements that are saved as a set of separate metadata linked to the original image file

- Since the enhancements are a separate layer, the user can go into the gallery and disable/enable the AI enhancements even after taking the picture

Type B:

- AI scene and object recognition performs enhancements in real-time and adjusts the camera before the picture is taken, when the picture is taken the enhancements are written into the image file itself

- Because the enhancements are written to the image file as opposed to being a separate metadata layer, these pictures are treated the same as normal photos and cannot have AI toggled after they've been taken

In addition to the way the AI handles writing data, the enhancements themselves are also very different. Type A produces much more drastic changes to exposure and saturation across the entire image, and the changes are clearly visible to the human eye. Type B is more subtle, enhancing only certain areas of the image when needed (e.g. background, foreground subjects, moving objects), and so the differences aren't so obvious unless you really look close.

After my tests, I can say that older phones tend to use type A while newer models use type B.

Type A AI Photography:

- Honor View 10

- Honor 10

- Honor 10 Lite

- Huawei P20

- Huawei P20 Pro

- Huawei P Smart (2019)

Type B AI Photography:

- Honor View 20

- Huawei P30 Lite

- Huawei P30

- Huawei P30 Pro

The problem is that Huawei does not clearly define these differences in their technical specifications, instead marketing it all under the "AI Photography" umbrella term. To make matters even more confusing, both AI frameworks use the exact same user interface, so if you're used to one type and you use another phone, you would naturally expect the same user experience - hence how I initially mistook this for a bug in the software. And to make matters even more confusing, all of the internal frameworks use the exact same package identifiers, and sometimes even the identical version numbers. For example, HwCamera v.9.0.1.309 on the Honor 10 is actually different to HwCamera v.9.0.1.309 on the Honor View 20. It's only when you do extensive tests on a large set of devices and examine the actual internal components of the apps themselves can you finally discover that there are actually 2 different things happening here. And none of this kind of research should be left for the end consumer to do, when Huawei could have just made things clearer in the first place.

In my opinion, I prefer the enhancements made by type B because they're more subtle and natural-looking, but the implementation of using a separate image enhancement layer instead of overwriting the original image file by type A is better. Maybe in some future update they can allow non-destructive AI enhancements using the newer AI algorithms.