[soerxpso]

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.