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.

That just looks like typical camera and compression artifacts on a fine detail pattern, not like a generative AI that doesn’t actually know what it’s drawing so it starts making inaccurate extrapolations? What about that makes you think it was done by AI?