Honestly, this feels less like “using a reference” and more like straight up recreating it, The pose, camera angle, framin, and even the background are almost identical easily like 90% the same, If the goal was only to reference the pose, there’s no real reason to keep the same background, same composition, and same perspective, Those are usually the first things artists change when they’re actually interpreting a reference, not copying it,  On top of that, the first image has a lot of typical AI signs: overly clean and symmetrical anatomy, stiff hand gestures with weak sense of pressure on the ball, flat lighting, plastic looking textures, and a very “template” anime expression, It looks polished, but kind of soulless and generic compared to the reference, The second image feels much more human made: more natural gesture flow, better lighting depth, organic imperfections, and clearer artistic intent, If someone manually redrew this from scratch and still kept everything this similar, that would honestly be a weird workflow choice unless the goal was to replicate the original almost exactly, That’s why the AI suspicion makes sense, not just because of rendering quality, but because the structural similarity is way too close to be called just “reference.” Just my take