Last week, a Metafilter member posted a link to a new website for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig’s decade-long project to create “a dictionary of made-up words for the emotions we all feel, but don’t have the words to express.”
The sophisticated site includes everything you’d expect from a publisher’s promotional book site: an author biography, press mentions, and links to purchase the book on Amazon.
Strange, this also includes full text of bookFrom its initial 800-word preface to the entire collection of all 311 neologisms, with their accompanying definitions, etymologies, and short essays, all written by Koenig.
Conspicuously missing are the book’s original photo-collage illustrations, created by Koenig and several other artists. Instead, each word consists of an AI-generated image made from DALL-E 2, replete with errors and artifacts typical of that model.
A banner at the top of the homepage encourages visitors to “generate your own words using AI – giving voice to your suffering”. The Submit a Sadness feature lets you describe an emotion, and then use OpenAI’s GPT-4 to generate new words, etymologies, and definitions, which go into a gallery of “user-generated sadnesses” with AI generated art.
MetaFilter members were immediately suspicious, and so was I. My wife Ami and I created a card game in 2022, Lost for Words, partly inspired by Koenig’s project. We have a copy of the book, and I’ve followed it online for years. The embrace of AI seemed out of character.
Then I noticed that the new site was a completely different domain from the original Tumblr homepage:
Original:dictionofobscuresorrows.com
Reboot: dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
What’s going on over here?
a little history
John Koenig launched The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on Tumblr in 2009, and expanded it into a series of popular video essays in 2013.
If you know any word from the project, it’s probably “sonder,” which spread far beyond its origins, into colloquial speech and eventually reaching Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.
sondar
N. The feeling that every random passer-by is living a life just as vivid and complex as yours – full of his own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited madness – an epic story that continues around you invisibly like an anthill extending deep underground, with wide passageways to thousands of other lives whose existence you will never know, in which you may appear only once, in the background taking an extra sip of coffee, on the highway. As the blur of passing traffic, as a lighted window at dusk.
Other terms coined by Koenig have found life outside his project as well. You may have encountered “anemoia” (a feeling of nostalgia for a time or place you never knew), “velichor” (the strange sadness of used bookstores), or perhaps “monacopsis” (a subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place).
But “Sonder” is a distinct success. I bet most people who have heard this term don’t know it was coined by a guy on Tumblr in 2012.
There’s an R&B band named Sonder, a failed Airbnb rival, and countless businesses ranging from consultancies and VC firms to coffeehouses and dispensaries. There’s a bar called Sonder’s about two miles from me now.
That success landed Koenig a book deal with Simon & Schuster, and the book became a New York Times bestseller when it was released in November 2021.
Two years later, around August 2023, the new Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows website launched, but interestingly there was no reference to it from the official Tumblr page or social media.
a cunning deceiver
The mission of Koenig’s project, in his own words, is to “shed light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being”.
So it seemed odd that he would now encourage people to generate new words and definitions with LLM, a controversial technique that has been trained on a lot of human writing, but doesn’t know what it’s like to be human.
I reached out directly to John Koenig to ask if he was involved with the website. He emailed back an hour later:
Yeah man, I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know what to think or do about it, as the site is quite smooth. Really, even better than my own.
It wasn’t hard to figure out who was responsible because they list themselves in the “Site Credits” in the footer of each page: Quantoor (formerly Prompt Digital), a web design and marketing agency based in San Francisco.
The only indication that the site is not authorized is this page in their portfolio, where they talk about how “Quantur created the interactive digital platform – designing the site in Webflow, building an AI-powered image library, and launching a feature that lets visitors submit their own rhymes and add new definitions to the dictionary.”
On that page, they refer to themselves as “fans” of the book: “The site gives fans (like us) One place to find everything – videos, reviews, interviews and shopping links, instead of searching across a dozen platforms.”
Of course, the problem is that being a fan doesn’t give them the right to reuse any content for their own site.
Copyright and confusion
In the footer of Qontour’s unofficial site, they have added a copyright notice acknowledging that they do not own any rights to the content on the site, and have also licensed all user-submitted words in the public domain with a CC Zero license.
Dictionary Contents © John Koenig – All rights reserved.
User-generated content is openly licensed – CC Zero.
This exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of how copyright works. Kontur did not have the rights to publish Koenig’s entire book to showcase his web design skills.
She also submitted her site to Webflow’s directory to advertise her design business. “This effort demonstrated our expertise in website design, AI-generated content, and comprehensive content integration.”
Below the “Higher Quantore” button, a short link to “Copyright Information” misrepresents his work:
Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by Quantoor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. All rights reserved. In other words, it’s someone else’s work so you can’t copy or edit it for any reason, but you can share it with others.
Needless to say, you cannot re-license content that you do not own.
Complicating his claims of it being a fan tribute, Quantoor also used his own Amazon affiliate code throughout the site, created under his previous name Prompt Digital, giving him a cut of all book sales.
Those commissions must have been worthwhile over the years, as the unofficial site is now the top search result for almost every query related to the book, including the title of the book, words coined in the book, and even John Koenig’s name. In every Google search I’ve tried, the unofficial site ranks above the official site, the publisher’s site, or Wikipedia.
This is made worse by the rapid shift from traditional web search to conversational AI search, which is easier to manipulate, hide sources, and condense context into simple answers.
ChatGPT and Gemini both link to the bootleg as the official website, and both claim that John Koenig created it.
This creates legitimate confusion over its authorship, and arguably, harms the reputation of the project and the book with its enthusiastic embrace of AI. The person who originally posted the site on MetaFilter thought it was the official site, and commenters in the thread, appropriately, questioned whether the book itself was written by an AI.
I asked Koenig if his publisher planned to remove the site, but did not receive a response.
After emailing him, I realized that Simon & Schuster Did Took steps last year to limit its reach. They filed two DMCA takedowns (1, 2) with Google last July, asking them to remove two pages from the bootleg site from their results. It had no effect.
AI and consent
It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, without any commercial purpose. (“No copyright intended!”) It’s another thing for a marketing agency to take a book by an entire living author, replace his art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outsell the official site everywhere.
This is a more flagrant form of plagiarism than you typically see these days, where human-written works are laundered with AI models in a way that differs significantly from their sources in order to avoid legal issues.
But it’s not surprising to see it coming from an agency that has leaned so heavily into generative AI. As they proudly explain, “Every page on this site was written in the cloud” using an “author persona” they call “Q.”
what’s missing here consentWhich sounds like the original sin of AI. As I’ve written many times before, generic AI models are trained on vast collections of human-authored works without attribution, consent, or compensation, extracting value from creators while centralizing power among a handful of big tech companies.
On a much smaller scale, Quantur could have reached out to John Koenig for permission to republish his work, and collaborated with him on a new, improved website for the book. She might have asked them to limit it to just the words published on her Tumblr, might have asked them not to build an AI feature, or might have just said no to the whole thing, which would be her right.
last words
What happened with The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows may have been more brazen, but it is not an isolated case.
This is part of a broader trend happening across the web, where people are using AI to repackage, adapt, and transform for profit the authoritative sources it was trained on.
Almost every day, I’m emailed a newly-launched, obviously vibecoded website full of AI-generated content that was designed to divert attention away from human creators: bloggers, writers, journalists, artists, musicians and anyone who slowly, painstakingly makes things for a living. I’m no longer even sure if the emails I’m receiving are from a human being.
The feeling of being swallowed up and reused by a machine designed to replace the person who made the thing you love seems like a uniquely modern sadness.
Maybe there should be a word for this.
You can buy John Koenig Dictionary of Unexplained Sorrows At Powell’s Books, direct from its publisher, or at your local indie bookstore. If you have to use Amazon, you can purchase it using the author’s own affiliate code so he gets the biggest share of the sale.
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