I saw the watermark stuff, and I’m not contesting any of that, my specific interest is in the fine-detail artifacts. The apparent leaning of some of the bars, eg the 5th and 6th, can 100% be explained by something like a smudge between them; I’d know because I actually drew up some parallel bars in paint.net, rotated and zoomed them, lightened a splotch, and gave it blur to match. Human eyes and brain are pretty good at picking out valid details from degraded images, but you have to remember we’re talking about the level of shading of a handful of pixels, it does not take much disturbance at all to create an illusion of non-parallel lines. A hard object hitting the tag there would be enough to damage the barcode printing slightly to create such a lightening as would produce the leaning appearance.

I’m not saying that an AI didn’t draw the barcode, and I’m not even saying that it doesn’t have an effect like that because of generative AI imperfections. I’m saying that nothing that I see, or that has been pointed out to me, about the appearance of the barcode provides any indication or suggestion that the image is AI-generated, instead of those being typical results of looking at an image that has been resized and compressed/converted as it travels across the internet. Or to say the quiet part out loud, that those who see “ai artifacts” in the barcode are chasing ghosts, regardless of the actual image creation or the presence of watermarks/fingerprinting.