I suppose someone could have synthesized it using older tools – generative AI wasn’t the first way to create images, even if it’s pretty potent and easy to use – but it was online long before the sort of generative AI systems we have today existed. They weren’t used to create it.
Tineye can place bounds on how late an image could have been created.
https://tineye.com/search/d51489e88c5e15819a915598041f51527989190f?sort=crawl_date&order=asc&page=1
I suppose someone could have synthesized it using older tools – generative AI wasn’t the first way to create images, even if it’s pretty potent and easy to use – but it was online long before the sort of generative AI systems we have today existed. They weren’t used to create it.