Month: September 2023

Enlarge (credit: Coca-Cola)

Coca-Cola has taken a fizzy leap into the future of AI hype with the release of Coca‑Cola Y3000 Zero Sugar, a "limited-edition" beverage reportedly co-created with artificial intelligence. Its futuristic name evokes flavor in the year 3000 (still 977 years away), but its marketing relies on AI-generated imagery from 2023—courtesy of the controversial image synthesis model Stable Diffusion.

Stable Diffusion, a technology which is mentioned by name when launching the "Coca-Cola Y3000 AI Cam" mobile app, gained its ability to generate images by scraping hundreds of millions of copyrighted works found on the Internet without copyright holder permission and is currently the subject of litigation related to copyright infringement.

But there is no hint of that controversy in Coca-Cola's marketing materials, which lean heavily into today's buzzy, AI-centered tech zeitgeist.

Enlarge (credit: Coca-Cola)

Coca-Cola has taken a fizzy leap into the future of AI hype with the release of Coca‑Cola Y3000 Zero Sugar, a "limited-edition" beverage reportedly co-created with artificial intelligence. Its futuristic name evokes flavor in the year 3000 (still 977 years away), but its marketing relies on AI-generated imagery from 2023—courtesy of the controversial image synthesis model Stable Diffusion.

Stable Diffusion, a technology which is mentioned by name when launching the "Coca-Cola Y3000 AI Cam" mobile app, gained its ability to generate images by scraping hundreds of millions of copyrighted works found on the Internet without copyright holder permission and is currently the subject of litigation related to copyright infringement.

But there is no hint of that controversy in Coca-Cola's marketing materials, which lean heavily into today's buzzy, AI-centered tech zeitgeist.

Enlarge / Saltwater taffy is made by stretching and pulling the sticky candy base to create air bubbles for a fluffy and chewy confection. (credit: Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0)

When San To Chan successfully defended their PhD thesis, they received a gift of saltwater taffy to celebrate and couldn't help being intrigued by the taffy's unusual consistency: somewhere between a solid and liquid. That led to experiments investigating the taffy's rheology—how it deforms in response to applied forces—and how the ingredients and taffy-making process contribute to that rheology. The results are described in a new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

“Taffy is a viscoelastic material—it has properties between a viscous liquid and an elastic solid," said Chan, now a postdoc in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT Media Lab. "Comparing the deformation behavior of commercial taffy to those of different lab-made sugar syrups and lab-made taffies allowed us to identify the most important taffy ingredient (and material structure) that governs taffy rheology.”

It's just the latest example of a burgeoning area of research focusing on the science of food—something that's frequently on the menu here at Ars. For instance, in 2020, physicists examined the physics of wok-tossed fried rice and found that the secret to a perfect dish (i.e., nicely browned but not burnt) was a timely combination of side-to-side and see-sawing motions while cooking. In 2022, MIT physicists coined the term "oreology" for their study of why—when twisting two Oreo cookie halves apart—the creme filling typically sticks to only one chocolate wafer.