Month: September 2023

Enlarge / Yellow oleander. (credit: Getty | FlowerPhotos)

Last September, a New Jersey toddler got ahold of a bottle of weight loss supplements. The product, purchased by the toddler's mothers, was labeled as the dried root of tejocote, aka Mexican hawthorn, a large shrub-like plant found in Mexico and Latin America that produces crabapple-like fruits. Although there's little data on the effects of the dried root—including any supporting its use for weight loss—tejocote is generally considered safe to consume.

But the toddler soon experienced nausea and vomiting. At an emergency department, doctors noted low heart rate, falling blood pressure, irregular heartbeats, and a telltale anomaly on an electrocardiogram.

The weight loss supplement was, in fact, not harmless tejocote root—it was entirely pieces of yellow oleander, a poisonous plant containing cardiac glycosides, including a toxic cardenolide, that can cause dysrhythmia and cardiac arrest, among other things.

Enlarge / The original AI-generated spiral village that captivated social media, created using Stable Diffusion and ControlNet. (credit: Ugleh / Stable Diffusion)

On Sunday, a Reddit user named "Ugleh" posted an AI-generated image of a spiral-shaped medieval village that rapidly gained attention on social media for its remarkable geometric qualities. Follow-up posts garnered even more praise, including a tweet with over 145,000 likes. Ugleh created the images using Stable Diffusion and a guidance technique called ControlNet.

Reactions to the artwork online ranged from wonder and amazement to respect for developing something novel in generative AI art. "Never seen pictures like this. Something new in the world of art," wrote one X user. "Tbh, I’ve seen a LOT of ai art, been in this space a long long time, and this is one of the most awesome pieces I’ve ever seen. You did so good," wrote AI artist Kali Yuga on X.

Perhaps most notably, Y-Combinator co-founder and frequent social media tech commentator Paul Graham wrote, "This was the point where AI-generated art passed the Turing Test for me."

Enlarge (credit: Maryna Terletska | Moment)

Yesterday, some of the biggest textbook publishers sued Library Genesis, an illegal shadow library that publishers accused of "extensive violations of federal copyright law."

Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. They claimed that Library Genesis (aka Libgen) is operated by unknown individuals based outside the United States, who know that the shadow library is "one of the largest, most notorious, and far-reaching infringement operations in the world" and intentionally violate copyright laws with "absolutely no legal justification for what they do."

According to publishers, Libgen offers free downloads for over 20,000 books that the publishers never authorized Libgen to distribute. They claimed that Libgen is "a massive piracy effort" and noted that their complaint may be updated if more infringed works are found. This vast infringement is causing publishers and authors serious financial and creative harm, publishers alleged.