Computational Photography Processing

Is this a “raw” photo or has a bunch of computional photography / AI been applied?

Maybe in this case, because these are phone pictures, which are quite heavily processed (sharpening, denoising, tone mapping, local white balance, local contrast). The raw image may contain a bit less of that stuff.

Processing is different. The camera won't capture the same thing you see with your eye. A lot of processing is done to try and make the photograph feel the same as it did to actually view the scene with your own eye. And that's perfectly fine.

It's pretty hard to tell without knowing what sort of image was input to the computational photography process

Where do you draw the line? RAW, HDR, photo stitching, blur removal?

It's how sensor and post-processing play together. You probably won't enjoy the look that is coming straight out of camera (ordinary and ugly), so an artistic license is applied in "cooking" colors, noise removal, sharpening, remapping of light dynamic range etc. to make it look better. If you do pro photography, you might be amused how much artificial some photos look straight out of camera, especially if you are using off-camera flashes; sometimes you get candy-like photos

Are they not? Every modern camera does the same thing. Upscaling, denoising, deblurring, adjusting colors, bumping and dropping shadows and highlights, pretty much no aspect of the picture is the way the sensor sees it once the rest of the pipeline is done. Phone cameras do this to a more extreme degree than say pro cameras, but they all do it.

This has nothing to do with editing. Modern smartphones combine multiple pictures for each picture you take, and have very sophisticated demosaicing, noise reduction and color grading. No app needed.

That is honestly a post-processing choice and not entirely a reflection of the camera.

Yes, nothing really wrong with this. Just pointing out that what hits the sensor is far off from what's being saved.However, some phones now even apply AI filters to fill in detail it didn't capture. Like adding craters to the moon.And the thing about contrast, sharpness etc is that "more always looks better" at a quick glance. So when people are doing comparisons between phones etc, the one destroying the picture the most might be declared the winner.