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I'm going to disagree, but I hope you don't take it personally. I think it's really important that we tune our slop detectors so I'm interested in discussing these things when we disagree about whether an image is AI. Maybe I'm still wrong.

You're right that there is something uncanny about this photo, but the thing is that it's a stock image which means it's a composed photo, not a natural scene.

The hue and saturation are high because it was post-processed to make it stand out in a brochure or ad. The colors of the hats and jackets are balanced across the image because the photographer composed the image this way to make it look aesthetically pleasing.

I'm not sure whether the pallets defy physics because I've never worked in a warehouse, but I think it's normal to stack pallets with a forklift like that, or maybe this is just a staged setup used for the purpose of this photo.

But really my reasoning is a posteriori because I already did a reverse image search and found another stock photo of the same people.

All of the details in the second image look identical, and if you've ever tried to get an AI image generator to make a variation on an image you'll know how difficult it is to achieve that. Usually some major features will inexplicably change between variations of an image.

If you look at other photos in that stock collection, there are a lot that are obviously AI generated (like this one, and they have this text in the description:

Generated with AI
Editorial use must not be misleading or deceptive.

But the stock photo used in this article doesn't have that disclaimer on it, so I'm erring on the side of this being a composed, but real photo. The reason (IMO) that it evokes the same slop vibes, is that a huge number of the images that these gen-AI models are trained on are stock photos, so they have a tendency to produce these types of images that look like composed photos rather than natural scenes.