To be fair, I totally understand why people think it's AI. Between the phone camera processes and the extreme postprocessing, this looks more deep fried than some memes I've seen. It almost looks like it's got a cartoon filter applied.
Add on the fact that OP is trying hard to down play how much editing has been done, it starts to feel like it doesn't add up. If OP posted the unedited photo to show the bad phone sharpening and admitted how much editing was done on top of that, people would understand what they are looking at.
Don't get me wrong, it looks cool, but when someone says "oh, no I just took this with my phone", I look at that and think that's not the whole truth.