This article from the Sydney Morning Herald seems to confirm, although it does not contain a picture of the question.

Her classmate Ally Xie, 18, said this year’s English paper was different in that the hardest question (worth five marks) in the first short-answer section came at the middle of the exam – not at the end. That asked students to consider a piece of writing about a farm and compare it to a photo of an old MacBook placed on a table next to a river.

“All my friends were like: ‘That’s artificial intelligence’,” Ally said.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/a-strange-question-hsc-students-quizzed-about-smell-in-english-exam-20241015-p5kigj.html

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald seems to confirm, although it does not contain a picture of the question.

Her classmate Ally Xie, 18, said this year’s English paper was different in that the hardest question (worth five marks) in the first short-answer section came at the middle of the exam – not at the end. That asked students to consider a piece of writing about a farm and compare it to a photo of an old MacBook placed on a table next to a river.

“All my friends were like: ‘That’s artificial intelligence’,” Ally said.

‘A strange question’: HSC students quizzed about smell in English exam