alt.hn

3/28/2025 at 2:09:10 PM

Japanese scientists create new plastic that dissolves in saltwater overnight

 https://newatlas.com/materials/plastic-dissolves-ocean-overnight-no-microplastics/

by bentobean

3/28/2025 at 9:40:51 PM

Actual source (source of source of source):

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado1782

More research from Takuzo Aida, which is quite impressive to read how they got there:

https://www.science.org/authored-by/Aida/Takuzo

by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t

3/29/2025 at 1:36:22 AM

Science article also has some test apparatus images, heat processed finished plastic images, and images of the plastic under attack by several different solvents (hexane, CH2Cl2, THF, Acetone, MeOH, DMF).

Also has stress-strain curves of the material, and behavior when used in glued together boxes for packaging.

Generally, if it actually gets made in quantity, seems like it would be an improvement for somewhere like Japan. Last time I read about Japan on this type of subject, it was examining the outlets of metropolitan streams, and the huge quantities of trash that people just wash down to the oceans. (Notably, from the perspective of considerate people trying to figure out ways to keep the beaches clean and deal with the upstream polluters).

by araes

3/28/2025 at 3:45:30 PM

Not sure if that thing could be used as food packaging, since food has salt and water.

Also that means this plastic probably has a very short lifespan.

by jokoon

3/28/2025 at 4:25:19 PM

Your remark hints at the fundamental problem with plastics: lifespan and chemical resistance. We worked so hard to develop plastics which have a long lifespan and high chemical resistance which makes them extremely versatile for containers and structures we don’t want to fall apart on their own.

At the same time, it’s these exact same properties of plastics which make them non-biodegradable and resistant to being broken down by the human body’s immune system and waste removal processes. The advantages we developed them for are also the disadvantages we’re trying to replace them for.

In the end, what we truly want is a product that lasts as long as we want and no longer. Something that’s indestructible while it’s in use but can be decomposed and recycled instantly with the push of a button. This is a paradox!

by chongli

3/28/2025 at 8:50:53 PM

It's not really a fundamental problem if plastic was only used for things that are meant to stay whole a long time. Say an RFID tag or a piece of trim on a car.

Currently we put supermarket-made perishable salads in a plastic container, we wrap the container in plastic, we put a plastic strip lid on it, and we put the oil and nuts in two separate plastic wrappers inside the plastic container. That is ludicrous insanity for something that perishes in a couple of days max.

by jorvi

3/28/2025 at 8:38:11 PM

This is true, but there are escape hatches to this, so it's not a true paradox.

A few examples: If we could get a glass that melts at a lower temperature and is more impact resistant, we'd be halfway there.

Also, if we could easily melt down the plastic without degradation, that would be nice as well.

Also, if we could easily dissolve the plastic in a solvent that wasn't highly toxic. That would be great too.

Basically if we could make the containers out something that makes it easy to reshape and reuse, we could convince more people to collect most of the waste. It would be more valuable as an input to many different crafting or manufacturing processes.

But also, wood is kind of polymer, and chemical is pretty similar to plastic, and there are a lot of different kind of plastics out there, they are all pretty different, so it's a bit hard to generalize in this area.

by aeonik

3/28/2025 at 7:05:17 PM

The article mentions a hydrophobic coating, like a fence around the plastic: once breached by a scratch (or by being crushed) the coating no longer keeps salt water out.

I wonder whether the coating itself is made from something terrible. In principle, though, there's your "push of a button": throw the plastic bottle in a trash compactor, break through the coating, now it dissolves in the sea.

by card_zero

3/30/2025 at 4:36:11 PM

So like cardboard boxes then.

by culopatin

3/28/2025 at 5:47:16 PM

Plastic containers have many strengths, but if we consider a subset then glass is a competitor. In some sense we can have a great container and not worry about substances leeching into food, it just won't be as lightweight and trivial as plastic.

by threatofrain

3/28/2025 at 8:21:08 PM

Would the average consumer be willing to accept the price increase due to the weight of glass containers vs plastic? The heavier glass will cost the vendor more in shipping on top of the container itself. That's shipping from the glass maker to the bottling facility, shipping from the bottling facility to the distribution center, shipping from distro to retail. There could then be additional shipping from retail to consumer.

Glass would also be much more susceptible to storage temperatures. Liquids susceptible to temps below freezing could be bad for glass containers without enough room for contents expansion.

by dylan604

3/28/2025 at 9:15:30 PM

Flexible glass exists, if used in a non-sphere container, the container flexing will allow more volume with same surface area. Using flexible glass as a very thin coating around paper, a container could be kept lightweight and the shipping cheap.

by HappyPanacea

3/28/2025 at 5:10:29 PM

It's what makes sense. I don't think it's that hard given materials available, I think companies just forego putting thought into it because customers don't care and will claim their products are weak and not long lasting, while having to spend more money for the problem.

Things like sandwich containers/wrappers shouldn't even be plastic to begin with. A salad container should probably not have a lifespan of much more than a week or so. A disposable cup should probably be designed to hold liquid for a period of something like 12-24h then rapidly degrade under liquid.

I'd love to see more alternatives pop up in the short term, whether it's natural wax paper, banana leaves, hollowed out shells or gourds, some type of thin wood, etc. But plastic is just so cheap and ubiquitous it's a hard thing to convince a company to do.

by silisili

3/28/2025 at 6:07:04 PM

> A disposable cup should probably be designed to hold liquid for a period of something like 12-24h then rapidly degrade under liquid.

As someone who once received a beverage in just such a disposable cup and then left it in my car overnight I have to say screw this idea.

by c22

3/28/2025 at 6:57:09 PM

In Other News: efforts to stem the tide of global pollution with microplastics brought to a halt by slobs who eat in their car.

Full Disclosure: I eat in my car.

by forgetfreeman

3/28/2025 at 7:26:25 PM

Would you really drink the rest of an opened beverage after it was left in your car overnight, though?

by jacobgkau

3/28/2025 at 8:00:11 PM

No, but that doesn't mean they want it spilled all over their car either.

by atrus

3/28/2025 at 5:30:48 PM

Those properties also coincide with being less toxic. Greater chemical reactivity means more unknown stuff gets into your food.

Unfortunately, less toxic until its found that they aren't, like PFASs.

by analog31

3/28/2025 at 4:56:10 PM

is it a paradox? how unlikely is it that there's a plastic substance out there that can be quickly dissolved to bio-degradable substances but only using a relatively cheap and non-toxic solvent not present in most use cases for plastic? that's not a paradox, it's an engineering problem.

by permo-w

3/28/2025 at 7:05:42 PM

No, we did a bad job. Rocks are also resistant against many things. Yet, they are not as much a problem.

by amelius

3/28/2025 at 7:38:10 PM

Asbestos is a rock. It makes a fantastic insulation (pretty much fireproof) but it's such a huge problem [1] that we have specialized workers who remove it from old buildings and perform the necessary cleanup to make the area safe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittenoom,_Western_Australia

by chongli

3/28/2025 at 9:48:09 PM

Yes, that's __one__ type of rock. Not sure what you want to prove here.

by amelius

3/28/2025 at 7:49:09 PM

In the end, what we truly want is a product that lasts as long as we want and no longer.

...and I hope by "we" you mean the owner and not the corporations pushing planned obsolescence aggressively, because that's exactly what they're going to do with things like this.

by userbinator

3/28/2025 at 7:57:46 PM

I mean we as a society. We want really good containers for our food and other goods we purchase but we don't want a mountain of indestructible waste piling up everywhere and causing pollution and health problems.

Before the invention of plastics we didn't have that. We had paper, metal, wood, and glass containers for food. They were either water susceptible (paper, wood, and metal) or expensive to manufacture and heavy (metal and glass) or even brittle and somewhat dangerous (glass but also metal with sharp edges).

We still use paper and some metal for a lot of food packaging today, but it's always mixed with plastic. Plastic bag inserts, plastic coating on paper packaging, plastic film to act as a barrier between the food and the paper, etc. Even the lowly paper coffee cup is coated with PTFE to make it waterproof!

by chongli

3/28/2025 at 8:59:32 PM

A thin coat of flexible glass around lightweight biodegradable material (like paper) might work - it is lightweight, nonreactive, not brittle or dangerous but might be somewhat more expensive to manufacture.

by HappyPanacea

3/28/2025 at 10:46:41 PM

That would be amazing. I'm not sure how that would be possible though. Soda lime glass, our most commonly used glass, has a melting point that begins at 700C (~1300F) and doesn't become very workable until much higher temperatures than that! This is far too hot to be anywhere near most ordinary kinds of paper.

Other glasses have much higher melting points than that, with fused silica melting at 2200C!

by chongli

3/28/2025 at 4:05:26 PM

> There’s one major hurdle with any degradable plastic material of course: what if it comes into contact with the catalyst for its destruction before you want it to? A plastic cup is no good if certain liquids can dissolve it, after all.

> In this case, the team found that applying hydrophobic coatings prevented any early breaking down of the material. When you eventually want to dispose of it, a simple scratch on the surface was enough to let the saltwater back in, allowing the material to dissolve just as quickly as the non-coated sheets.

by barbazoo

3/28/2025 at 4:16:53 PM

Is the coating made of PFAS, or wax?

by Ancalagon

3/28/2025 at 4:55:44 PM

Parylene C, a chlorocarbon: [1]

> Derivatives of parylene can be obtained by replacing hydrogen atoms on the phenyl ring or the aliphatic bridge by other functional groups. The most common of these variants is parylene C, which has one hydrogen atom in the aryl ring replaced by chlorine. [2]

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado1782

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parylene#Permeability

by 6177c40f

3/29/2025 at 3:17:50 AM

The primary mechanism for this to work is similar to “paper” straws

The product is coated in hydrophobic forever chemicals which protect the material ‘long enough’ before the core is compromised.

by ratg13

3/28/2025 at 8:04:13 PM

It would at least be useful for food delivery, since the packaging on that doesn't need to last more than a few hours tops.

by Asooka

3/28/2025 at 6:19:35 PM

Also human hand sweat has both salt and water so anything that requires a human to carry them might not be suitable.

by porphyra

3/28/2025 at 10:53:07 PM

Plastic should not be used as food packaging.

by bgnn

3/29/2025 at 6:04:40 AM

So what instead?

by gitaarik

3/30/2025 at 6:54:04 AM

Paper and glass.

by anticensor

3/28/2025 at 4:07:21 PM

I love the idea, but we could use glass, cardboard, wood, fabric for 90% of the things we are currently packaging with plastic. The cheese I am just eating not just has plastic around, but even plastic between every single cheese slice. Stuns me that wasting resources like this does not get taxed.

by nilslindemann

3/28/2025 at 4:34:52 PM

If an alternative is more expensive, it seems like we should at least consider whether it’s also wasting more resources? I would want to see the comparison done well, rather than simply assuming that plastic must be worse.

by skybrian

3/28/2025 at 5:01:04 PM

it's not even necessarily about waste of resources. many microplastics and other complex oil-derived chemicals are quite obviously not [known to be] safe for human and other animals' health. we know pretty much for sure that most wood, glass types and natural fibres are safe.

by permo-w

3/28/2025 at 4:44:56 PM

We don't bake cost of proper disposal into materials, that is why plastic is so cheap.

The Chinese manufacture the stuff like crazy and ships it all of SEA. Rural communities dump it into their rivers and all of that washes out into the ocean which ends up EVERYWHERE.

Plastic, and oil in general, has been a global ecologic CATASTROPHE.

by honkycat

3/28/2025 at 7:39:10 PM

Cost of disposal for plastic is very small. You can get it into a well-made landfill for a couple pennies per pound in the US. Charging manufacturers an extra little fraction of a penny for an item isn't a bad idea but it wouldn't affect much. What matters is government desire to handle trash properly.

by Dylan16807

3/28/2025 at 9:39:50 PM

If you factor in the cost of any government managed trash cleanup, it might. Basically require producers to cover all of the costs required to get the trash disposed of properly. Filtering micro-plastics out of the ocean? Add it to the plastic tax. Health costs from birth defects caused by certain plastic exposure? Add it to the tax for those plastics.

I think the market works amazingly as long as there's government to line the incentives up right.

by leafmeal

3/28/2025 at 10:35:53 PM

I think disposing properly would mostly be a few more public trash cans and a ban on exporting plastic and trash to get fake-recycled. Which would not cost very much.

by Dylan16807

3/28/2025 at 3:27:25 PM

This is great progress! If a solution like this can reduce global hard plastic usage by even 1%, that would be a massive impact.

It's encouraging to see smart people attacking this hard problem persistently, delivering new solutions, and inching us closer to a real breakthrough with each iteration.

by hedayet

3/28/2025 at 4:34:45 PM

> If a solution like this can reduce global hard plastic usage by even 1%, that would be a massive impact.

I would understand if it reduces plastic pollution, but how could it reduce usage?

by krisoft

3/28/2025 at 6:29:52 PM

If this a good substitute for "hard plastic" then it could reduce usage by replacing it.

by Y_Y

3/28/2025 at 7:30:46 PM

But wouldn't the thing we're replacing it with also be a hard plastic? Then we're reducing the use of more persistent hard plastics but we're not reducing hard plastic use overall.

by Dylan16807

3/28/2025 at 4:47:31 PM

I read it as “by replacing use of some hard plastics”.

by foundart

3/28/2025 at 4:39:18 PM

Through regulation?

by kikoreis

3/28/2025 at 4:19:28 PM

Excited to never see this technology get used!

by jklinger410

3/28/2025 at 5:54:52 PM

Looks like we can have plastic straws shamelessly now. And plastic cutlery as well.

by nashashmi

3/29/2025 at 4:55:58 AM

Pollution is still seen as some technical problem even in 2025 but im not convinced. I think for decades I’ve read about some miracle substance that is environmentally friendly and can replace trad plastics. Decades later still virtually no practical movement in the space can be seen.

by ost-ing

3/29/2025 at 3:37:45 PM

That's because this news is reported the same way that new battery breakthroughs are reported.

Creating a material in a lab is far from mass production and field testing.

by parineum

3/28/2025 at 6:20:56 PM

Only three things in life are certain: taxes, death, and microplastics. And I’m not sure about the former.

by deadbabe

3/28/2025 at 3:22:39 PM

This is a total guess, but I imagine some of our biggest uses for single-use plastic involves food containers, medical equipment, and protecting things from the elements during transit. A lot of times that means exposure to salty solutions. Dissolving overnight would probably be way too fast.

by goda90

3/28/2025 at 3:23:43 PM

> Dissolving overnight would probably be way too fast.

They addressed that issue, it's in the article.

by nonelog

3/28/2025 at 3:31:50 PM

I don't think they really did? A single scratch to cause it to break down doesn't seem like it would really be a scalable solution for any kind of mass produced material like this. Would cause chaos if any individual container went bad in a shipment, so it's not really addressed I feel. OP's concerns still stand.

by tbalsam

3/28/2025 at 4:07:42 PM

The next step is engineering a hydrophobic coating or other biodegradable packaging that offers an adequate level of resistance to accidental scratching for a particular application, and identifying applications that are tolerant to failure of the plastic or not exposed to salt water.

by directevolve

3/28/2025 at 5:05:06 PM

>The next step is engineering a hydrophobic coating or other biodegradable packaging that offers an adequate level of resistance to accidental scratching for a particular application

then you're back to square one. you might as well just make the whole thing out of that material

by permo-w

3/28/2025 at 6:16:18 PM

If the hydrophobic material has different properties than the plastic, they can complement each other. For example, soda cans have an inner coating that eliminates a soda pop-aluminum interface, preserving flavor and protecting the structural integrity of the can.

By analogy, we can imagine sheets of this material where nearly all the mass is the degradable plastic, and a thin film of coating is enough to preserve it adequately for its purpose in the product where it’s being used.

by directevolve

3/28/2025 at 3:45:10 PM

Simply wrap it in a protective plastic packaging.

by garbawarb

3/28/2025 at 3:27:22 PM

> medical equipment

This will be perfect for IV bags!

by xattt

3/28/2025 at 3:37:04 PM

Perfect for saline solution, right?

by moandcompany

3/28/2025 at 8:05:49 PM

Now help me mop up this mess in the med room.

by xattt

3/28/2025 at 7:08:50 PM

If it's been compromised then the whole thing just melts away.

by GloriousKoji

3/28/2025 at 4:57:13 PM

What a great development. Commenters have noted various challenges that will need to be addressed but they seem largely solvable to me. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this as it moves from the lab to real applications.

by foundart

3/28/2025 at 4:49:17 PM

The fact we haven't globally banned single use plastic is incredibly stupid.

by honkycat

3/28/2025 at 3:11:26 PM

What's the element that will have this invention NOT be killed by the usual suspects, though?

It's really not the first time something game-changing has been invented, only for it not be heard of ever again.

by nonelog

3/28/2025 at 4:31:08 PM

Making plastics out of sodium, phosphorus, and guanidinium ions [1] which the link characterizes as a "strong organic base", which is designed to break down and so will do so not just in the ocean, suggests to me that there are enough engineering disadvantages the article is not talking about that we'll probably never see this in real life.

It's chemically quite distant from traditional plastics.

The ocean may not care about some extra sodium and phosphorus... and then again, if we made enough, maybe it would... but I'll graciously assume for now it wouldn't, but the other places this would inevitably end up breaking down would probably not appreciate the resulting mess. I have to imagine any quantity of this in a fire near humans would be a fairly substantial problem of some sort. I don't know exactly what would pop out but it's got some awfully "exciting" feedstock going in to it with that sodium and phosphorus.

[1]: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/guanidinium#sectio...

by jerf

3/28/2025 at 4:39:30 PM

The guys marketing these things are really hoping that you have forgotten the law of conservation of mass.

The ultimate problem with these dissolving plastics is that they are still plastic after they dissolve, it's just that they are invisible microplastics instead of visible objects. They largely aren't captured at WWTP and end up in the water supply.

by jabroni_salad

3/28/2025 at 3:45:52 PM

Realistically? Taxes and tax enforcement. That’s really the only consistent and persistent way to change the incentives of the world’s economies. In most developed economies, the ultra wealthy are able to avoid paying their fair share, and the same goes for large corporations as well.

Without fairness, there’s really no easy way to talk about strategy.

by thunkingdeep

3/29/2025 at 3:45:35 PM

What's a fair share?

I don't get how this phrase has got ao much traction from the people who are in support of various social safety net programs that are specifically designed to benefit those who don't pay their fair share.

If you and I split a pizza and I pay for none but eat half, is that fair? Even if I'm poor and your rich, that's not fair.

It might be right, it might be good but it's certainly not fair.

by parineum

3/30/2025 at 10:18:20 PM

In the context of taxes and tax enforcement, I have no choice but to assume you are being intentionally obtuse as to what I mean by “fair share”

by thunkingdeep

3/31/2025 at 7:44:11 PM

> In the context of taxes and tax enforcement

In the context of politicians rallying their base, it's meant to insinuate the actual antithesis of it's normal meaning. Furthermore, it's a subjective word that means different things to different people so politicians can appeal to everyone's internal definition of fair, which is usually making everyone that makes more money than them pay more.

It's a political slogan. It adds nothing to the actual discourse but it does get people out to vote!

I guess the only "intentionally obtuse" part of my comment was the "I don't get how this phrase has got so much traction..." part.

The "ultra-wealthy" and "corporations" pay plenty of taxes, they just pay it significantly different than you do so that if you want to compare W2s, it looks wrong but that's another disingenuous tool to con you into voting.

by parineum

3/28/2025 at 3:45:21 PM

I dunno, I am sure the plastic industry would be thrilled to be able to get around environment concerns.

by DanielHB

3/28/2025 at 4:07:16 PM

Probably the same thing that kills everything- cost and/or durability/usability.

by Mistletoe

3/28/2025 at 4:44:13 PM

This isn't game changing? We ALREADY have biodegradable containers that degrade in salt water overnight and can be prevented from degrading with a coating that can then be breached by a scratch:

It's called paper. I've used paper products with a hydrophobic coating (which means plastic, consumers don't like wax coatings that much) for decades. They don't solve the problem, because the plastic coating still fills us with microplastics.

Maybe it cuts down on how much plastic is produced and thrown away, but we could have done this 20 years ago!

There's no conspiracy thwarting "game changing" research to maintain some status quo, though there ARE often political factions who push for maintenance of the status quo.

This is marketing. The people who write this stuff are marketers and they usually don't understand the research in the first place!

This is why, despite everyone insisting that there are hundreds of "This will revolutionize batteries" that everyone complains never materialize, we have actually seen them materialize as lithium batteries like doubling in capacity over a decade. The marketing material overpromised, though the research was fruitful.

Because it's marketing.

by mrguyorama

3/28/2025 at 6:07:35 PM

Every week I hear about a new solution to plastic. Every week more microplastics end up in my brain. I feel like we are not solving the problem.

by mirawelner

3/28/2025 at 7:52:36 PM

There never has been a problem. It's only the fact that the industry has found a new virtue-signaling way to get you to consume more that they started collaborating with extremists in pushing the "plastics bad" propaganda.

by userbinator

3/28/2025 at 3:07:34 PM

Obligatory "it's a big step to production", but we need heaps of new research on biodegradabe plastics by yesterday, so this is hopeful. I wish they'd say what kind of plastic it replaces, though.

by lores

3/28/2025 at 5:52:29 PM

Best placement for this plastic is to be in a composite of other materials like cotton fiber.

by nashashmi

3/28/2025 at 8:22:23 PM

I'm worried this will cause a buildup of plastic in arctic regions during the summer

by jimnotgym

3/28/2025 at 8:30:12 PM

Stop worrying and read the article, it contains the answer.

by nonelog

3/28/2025 at 7:20:01 PM

Honestly an ideal plastic is one that completely dissolves in water/salt water in 5-20 years. You want durability, just not the ability to last for tens of thousands of years.

by dyauspitr

3/28/2025 at 4:18:06 PM

"An artist's impression of the new plastic, showing the strong bonds above the water and how they break down when submerged in saltwater"

No, that's an AI image. Which is not itself a problem, but it's also useless garbage because neither the AI, nor the person generating it, appear to understand what is actually happening, and consequently the image is literally worse than useless. Image has what appear to be benzene rings, although the AI is clearly crossing that concept with neurons, but sodium hexametaphosphate has a fairly different shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hexametaphosphate that I would expect an artist to pick up on... and of course the cross-contamination of the neuron concept is just wrong.

And even by strictly non-scientific standards, the ocean having two distinct surfaces, one below another, is just unsightly and obviously wrong. Alternatively, this plastic really does rip holes in the ocean's surface and directly expose The Murky Depths to the surface world in a geometrically anomalous manner, in which case for C'thulu's sake we should probably never manufacture this stuff in any quantity.

I won't go so far as to say AI image generation shouldn't be used here, but this is a nominally educational context. It needs to be screened by someone who can make sure it actually means something other than "you are a dummy who can't handle too much text in a single block so here's some bling to stab your dopamine receptors so you can bear the terrible drudgery of continuing to read".

by jerf

3/28/2025 at 4:58:33 PM

Looks like it comes from the original RIKEN article [1], where they call it an "artistic rendering" instead of an "artist's impression." More accurate, I suppose, but I wish people would just actually say if an image is AI generated or not, at least for the sake of clarity.

[1] https://www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/research_news/rr/20250327_...

by 6177c40f

3/28/2025 at 6:59:33 PM

The original [0](PDF, Japanese) was published in November 2024 and features a similar but not identical rendering. I don’t think the original is AI generated at all.

[0]https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400252514.pdf

by alphan0n

3/28/2025 at 7:13:15 PM

It looks to me like the original image from that PDF was possibly fed into an AI program to generate a similar version, probably to get rid of the text (and possibly also to change the aspect ratio and/or just make it more picturesque for a news article).

by jacobgkau

3/28/2025 at 8:06:58 PM

That makes sense.

by alphan0n

3/28/2025 at 7:05:03 PM

i'm fine if the call it artist impression without calling it AI generated. i don't care if the artist's impression was created in watercolors, oil, charcoal, or AI. as long as it is identified as not an actual image is the main concern

by dylan604

3/28/2025 at 7:12:17 PM

The problem is that it's an AI program's impression, not an artist's impression.

Edit: If you can't get past the fact that AI image generators are not equivalent as an artistic medium to different types of paint, think of it this way: if I describe something to an artist and have them paint it, is the resulting image my impression because I prompted the artist, or is it the artist's impression of what I described? Clearly it's the artist's impression. So just because an "AI artist" prompts an AI app, that wouldn't make it the prompter's impression; it's still the AI app's impression. And an AI app's not an "artist" itself by virtue of being a computer program and not a human (as you yourself admit by attempting to liken it to a tool such as paint).

by jacobgkau

3/28/2025 at 8:09:32 PM

> The problem is that it's an AI program's impression, not an artist's impression.

I just made a similar reply, but I disagree with this. The artist iterates with their prompts to the AI tool to get what they wanted. So when they stopped tweaking the prompt, they were satisfied with the result to be their impression

by dylan604

3/29/2025 at 12:56:22 AM

"AI art generators enable the creation of ignorant and lazy illustrations by outsourcing understanding to an idiot robot."

"Yes, but is it not the intent of the artist to be ignorant and lazy?"

It is possible to repeatedly iterate AI art gen and get what you want, but that's not what happened here. And even so, it's not at all the same thing as drawing a picture: "iterating on what you want" is equivalent to curating art, not creating it. In the US you can copyright curation and that extends to curation of AI art - the US Copyright Office correctly said that tweaking prompts is the same thing as tweaking a Google Images search string for online image curation. But you can't copyright the actual AI-gen pictures, they are automatically public domain (unless they infringe someone else's copyright).

by aithrowawaycomm

3/29/2025 at 1:08:26 AM

> But you can't copyright the actual AI-gen pictures,

The US Copyright Office has, in fact, granted at least one copyright registration for an image created with the use of AI generation.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/invoke-snags-first-ai-imag...

by dragonwriter

3/29/2025 at 3:43:12 AM

I am specifically talking about DALL-E or Stable Diffusion, your link describes something very different. The point was the "Google Images" analogy, which applies to 99.999% of AI art but this is an exception.

by aithrowawaycomm

3/29/2025 at 3:57:08 AM

> I am specifically talking about DALL-E or Stable Diffusion, your link describes something very different.

No, it doesn't. It describes artwork done on Invokeai, one of the popular hosted web frontends for Stable Diffusion (and some similar models), with a process very much like what many AI art hobbyists use (whether with hosted frontends or locally-hostable ones like A1111, Forge, ComfyUI, or Fooocus.)

by dragonwriter

3/29/2025 at 4:02:29 AM

I don't understand your ridiculous pedantry! I am talking about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. I am not talking about other front ends to these services, nor did I dispute that your example deserved copyright protection. Invoke is very very different from plain text-to-image generation, WHICH IS WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT.

I think it's best if I log off and ignore your replies.

by aithrowawaycomm

3/29/2025 at 4:17:14 AM

> I am talking about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. I am not talking about other front ends to these services

Stable Diffusion is a series of models, not a service. There are various services (including the first-party Stable Assistant service from StabilityAI) and self-hosted frontends that use the models, most of which (including Stable Assistant) support considerably more interaction than simple text-to-image.

by dragonwriter

3/29/2025 at 3:02:27 AM

> But you can't copyright the actual AI-gen pictures

Is that actually true? What I’ve read is that AI can’t be credited with the copyright.

by dylan604

3/29/2025 at 3:58:19 AM

No, in general you cannot copyright them:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-created-images-lose-us-copy...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-copyright-office...

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-appeals-court-rejects-co...

See the other reply for a half-counterexample, but the major difference is the specific software is more like generative PhotoShop, and the final image involved a lot of manual human work. Simply tweaking a prompt is not enough - again you can get copyright for curation, just not the images."

Of course AI can't be credited with copyright - neither can a random-character generator, even if it monkeys its way into a masterpiece. You need legal standing to sue or be sued in order to hold copyright.

by aithrowawaycomm

3/29/2025 at 4:41:17 AM

Isn't it also possible that it wasn't an artist at all, instead someone whose job was never illustrating scientific articles (like a manager or a random intern), who put the text in the prompt and went "that looks pretty sciency, good enough" and the person responsible for the publication went "great, we just got a sciency image and saved $XX!"

Yeah the intern is now an "artist" but I think lumping them together is muddling the discussion.

by rendaw

3/29/2025 at 1:30:11 AM

When I dictate to a PM how they should present my stuff in their useless PowerPoints, that result could be called the PM’s impression. More specifically, their impression of my impression of the subject.

But after I’ve iterated with them N times, fixing their various misunderstandings of my impression, eventually the PM’s impression impact approaches zero, and it’s clearly representative solely of my impression.

Sufficient iterations and prompts against the model, and you can’t really say it’s the AI’s fault the result is erroneous. The first pass, sure, but not the 100th.

Except I guess in the aspects where you can’t fix the PM’s/AI’s understanding. Then you could say their impression isn’t fully removable

by setr

3/29/2025 at 7:05:22 AM

Except, despite all of your contempt project managers are people who can learn. LLMs are trained and can't learn anything after that. They have a very very short sliding window of context that will start to be dropped when you add more information.

So your example makes no sense.

by LtWorf

3/29/2025 at 5:36:20 PM

Why does it matter whether they can learn? If I let them run off after a single pass, then yes their understanding of my understanding is relevant. After the Nth review, it’s not. The latter is ideal, else you have the game of telephone

The question is whether their understanding still contributes to the end product, not who does the mechanical action of entering data or drawing images.

by setr

3/30/2025 at 11:16:34 PM

> Why does it matter whether they can learn?

Because nothing of consequence can be done in a single pass.

by LtWorf

3/31/2025 at 2:20:00 AM

…what? If I tell the PM the info needed, and he sufficiently produces the PPT without error, then it’s done? Why do I need further back n’ forths to make it consequential?

The number of passes/reviews is directly tied to error rate. If the PM/AI is able to produce my impression at 100% success, then great, there’s no further work to do.

The only thing learning matters for is with sufficient learning, they might reach a state where they no longer need to be reviewed, because they’ve sufficiently learned to not inject their own interpretation of things into it. They are now a straightforward extension of my own being, and have generated their documents as I would have done (had I the requisite mechanical time/skill/interest for producing whatever is in question).

by setr

3/29/2025 at 2:10:50 PM

And why are we assuming that someone lazy enough to use AI isn't doing more than 1 prompt to make something and going with it? They've lost all benefit of the doubt in my eyes.

by johnnyanmac

3/29/2025 at 5:46:14 PM

I’m not making that assumption. I’m suggesting that the difference between AI impression and Artist Impression is number of iterations — the solution to this disagreement.

Both terms are acceptable to use; this argument is fundamentally about how lazy you should assume these users to be. So argue about that directly.

by setr

3/29/2025 at 2:18:50 AM

The issue is the artist in this particular case didn't really provide their impression. When I hear that something is an "artist's impression" I expect it to mean that a reasonable thinking person read about the thing in at least more detail than I have (since all I've done is skim an article) and then created an image that conveys the information visually. If all the artist did is tell an AI to render "a piece of plastic dissolving in the ocean" it's not conveying any information that's not in the headline, and it's not very pretty either.

If the point was purely aesthetics, maybe they could at least use Midjourney or that new Ghibli style transfer thing instead of what looks about as good as old Dall-E? It's ugly. If the point was to convey information, they could have done that better with a 30-second pencil sketch, which would have also taken less effort than the AI-generated thing.

by soerxpso

3/28/2025 at 7:54:04 PM

You're fine with being mislead a little?

I'm not a materials scientist so I can't comment on this specific topic but based on my experience with pop science reporting errors and misinformation often come in multiples. The author has a "Bachelor of Arts in Professional Writing". RIKEN's press release is already written for a general audience and in English, so there isn't a good reason not to read the original source instead.

by trompetenaccoun

3/28/2025 at 8:07:45 PM

yes, because it's not really a misleading title as it is still the artist's impression. If the artist didn't like it, they would just keep modifying the prompt until they were satisfied. So it is the artist's impression.

where are we disagreeing?

by dylan604

3/29/2025 at 12:47:35 AM

Users of popular apps are not in control, the people tweaking the models are. GenAI is not an artist.

by trompetenaccoun

3/28/2025 at 6:18:40 PM

Using something similar to a benzene ring with spokes sticking out of it is absolutely a reasonable choice for depicting sodium hexametaphosphate in a schematic. This is actually a pretty common choice in scientific literature regarding this molecule.

by blix

3/29/2025 at 3:16:18 PM

If you look at it more carefully, it isn't really a benzene ring, though. It's got multiple layers to it.

And the neural net crossover is just wrong. Really, really wrong.

This is nominally educational content. Any way in which it is wrong is something that people can and will pick up on and form incorrect assumptions about which they will carry forward. It's not enough that it is vaguely sort of, if we're generous, isn't entirely wrong. That's not the bar for human work either.

by jerf

3/28/2025 at 5:09:56 PM

> It needs to be screened by someone

The people using this stuff want plausible deniability. If there's a problem with the slop, the computer did it, not me.

Screening it is contrary to that, so they won't do it.

by throwaway7679

3/28/2025 at 7:03:23 PM

That isn't an AI image. This thread is people winning an argument in their own heads.

It actually very much looks like the kind of ads for chemical companies you see in Japanese airports. (A funny contrast to the UK, which has decided it doesn't need to have an economy anymore so literally every ad in the London subway is for a musical.)

by astrange

3/28/2025 at 7:21:29 PM

> That isn't an AI image.

What's your source for that assertion? The image has AI-isms and is suspiciously similar to a much less AI-looking image that someone else in the thread linked to in a PDF regarding the research. You can say it looks like a human could've done it, but that's not any less "winning an argument in your own head" unless you've got evidence of what human drew that image.

by jacobgkau

3/28/2025 at 7:54:18 PM

I don't see any AI-isms. The most common one would be that parts of the image tend to be conceptually unclear or blend together, but these are recognizable objects composited into one image.

At most the bubbles could be, but I think they're just stock art.

by astrange

3/29/2025 at 3:17:59 PM

The ocean having two distinct surfaces, one distinctly below another, is such an AI-ism that I don't think I've ever in my life seen it in human-generated art.

You need to tune your detectors.

by jerf

3/29/2025 at 7:51:39 PM

Like I said, I'm pretty sure I've seen that exact thing in a subway ad before AI image generation was invented.

by astrange