The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows - Waxy.org

Skip to content

Last week, a MetaFilter member posted a link to what appeared to be a new website for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig’s decade-long project to make a "dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express."

The polished site includes everything you’d expect from a publisher’s promotional book site: an author biography, press mentions, and links to buy the book on Amazon.

Strangely, it also includes the entire text of the book, from its opening 800-word foreword to a complete archive of all 311 neologisms, with their accompanying definitions, etymology, and short essays, all penned by Koenig.

The book’s original photo-collage illustrations made by Koenig and several other artists are conspicuously missing. Instead, each word has an AI-generated image made with DALL-E 2, riddled with the errors and artifacts typical of that model.

"it’s half-past IŊΨ-o-clock"

A banner at the top of the homepage encourages visitors to "Generate your own words using AI – give your sorrows a voice!" The Submit A Sorrow feature lets you describe a feeling, and then uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to generate the new word, etymology, and definition, which go into a gallery of "User-Generated Sorrows" with AI generated art.

MetaFilter members were immediately suspicious, and so was I. My wife Ami and I made a card game in 2022, Lost for Words, partly inspired by Koenig’s project. We own a copy of the book, and I’d followed it online for years. The embrace of AI seemed out of character.

Then I noticed the new site was a different domain entirely:

The original: dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com<br>The reboot: the dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com

What’s going on here?

A Little History

John Koenig launched The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on Tumblr in 2009, expanding it to 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 origin, making its way into common parlance and, eventually, into Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.

sonder<br>n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Other words coined by Koenig have found a life outside his project. You may have encountered "anemoia" (a feeling of nostalgia for a time or place you’ve never known), "vellichor" (the strange wistfulness of used bookstores), or maybe "monachopsis" (the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place).

But "sonder" is the breakaway success. I’d wager most people who have heard the word have no idea 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 named Sonder two miles from me right now.

Photo from the official Instagram announcing the book’s release

That success landed Koenig a book deal with Simon & Schuster, and the book became a New York Times bestseller on its release in November 2021.

Two years later, around August 2023, the new Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows website launched, but curiously, with no reference to it from the official Tumblr page or social media.

A Slick Impostor

The mission of Koenig’s project, in his own words, is to "shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being."

So it felt strange that he would now be encouraging people to generate new words and definitions with LLMs, a contentious technology that has been trained on so much human writing, but can’t know what it’s like to be human.

I reached out to John Koenig directly to ask if he was involved with the website. He emailed back an hour later:

Yeah man, I had nothing to do with it. Don’t know what to think or do about that, as the site is pretty slick. Nicer than my own, really.

It wasn’t hard to find who was responsible since they list themselves in the "Site Credits" in the footer of every page: Qontour (formerly Prompt Digital), a web design and marketing agency based in San Francisco.

The only hint that the site isn’t authorized is this page in their portfolio, where they talk about how "Qontour built the interactive digital platform – designing the site in Webflow, generating an AI-powered image library, and launching a feature that lets visitors submit their own sorrows 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...