Cry. Key.

Can you specifically describe what you are seeing then that stands out as an AI artifact? I am genuinely interested, not just try to challenge your statement. Here's my observations and thoughts on it:

What I see is the JPEG compression blocks around the lines and characters where the chunk changes from a smooth color to a much noisier square; what looks to have once been much blockier aliased pixels forming the barcode lines that got scaled up and blurred, so now there are distinct vertical segments a within each line, as well as a noticeable gridding on the small characters (some of which might also be my viewer); and then possibly some sort of moire effect from the slightly angled barcode lines interacting with the grid of the pixels and/or JPEG compression chunk boundaries. As with many images on the internet, it looks like it has changed size and format in the past, and it's possible that someone composting an image from different sources would end up with different artifacting in different places.

Given how small the details of the barcode are, I think they would have to come pretty much entirely from the VAE decoding itself, not from the typical generative AI denoising that we would typically associate with hallucinations, extra fingers, and all the other "classic" tells of older image generation models as well as the less-specific "wrongness" of some more recent ones. So it would AFAIK end up having to be a pretty specific artifact to the actual base model being used, and even then just doing a VAE encoding into the compressed, many-dimensional latent-space and immediately decoding would produce the same artifact, and that's hardly an "AI" process on its own.

I'd say it's not by the irregularities on the shelf, ai rarely puts in those off topic details with that much care and irregularity. Unless ai was asked to use an original image as base then impose the product image.

Yes, AI has been able to take reference images for quite a while now.

And OpenAI generated images have invisible watermarks embedded into them so you can check if it's AI generated definitively. It's not an AI detector. Here: https://openai.com/research/verify/

It's sad how tech illiterate and yet still confidently wrong people can be.

Honestly sad people can be so wrong and arrogant. Educate yourself a bit: https://youtu.be/9btDaOcfIMY https://youtu.be/kVXp6UNVPTo