[Ads-l] “The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows”

[Emily Gordon]

>From Andy Baio’s blog Waxy (link:
https://waxy.org/2026/06/the-wholesale-plagiarism-of-obscure-sorrows/):

“Last week, a MetaFilter member posted a link
<https://www.metafilter.com/213450/The-tears-of-things> to what appeared to
be a new website for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
<https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/>, John Koenig’s decade-long
project <https://dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/> to make a ‘dictionary of
made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to
express.’

[screenshot of homepage]

“The polished site includes everything you’d expect from a publisher’s
promotional book site: an author biography
<https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/author>, press mentions
<https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/press>, and links to buy the
book <https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/buy-the-book> on Amazon.

“Strangely, it also includes **the entire text of the book**, from its
opening 800-word foreword
<https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/about> to a complete archive
of all 311 neologisms <https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/words>,
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.

[cursed image and caption]

“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
<https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/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 <https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/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 <https://lostforwords.cards/>,
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 than the original
Tumblr homepage <https://dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/> entirely:

“The original: dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
The reboot: *the*dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com

“What’s going on here?”

Link to full article:

https://waxy.org/2026/06/the-wholesale-plagiarism-of-obscure-sorrows/)

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