June 20, 2026
Sad words, stolen vibes
Agency stole bestselling author's book, used AI to relaunch as their own
Fans spotted the fake in minutes and the comments went straight for the jugular
TLDR: A copycat site appeared to repost a bestselling author’s full book under a nearly identical name, then dressed it up with AI images and a word-generator tool. Commenters were furious, calling it theft, demanding takedowns, and warning this kind of lazy rebranding could spread everywhere.
The internet loves a literary mystery, and this one came with fake feelings, a lookalike website, and some truly cursed robot art. Readers were stunned after a near-clone of John Koenig’s beloved Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows appeared online under a slightly different web address, packed with the entire text of the bestselling book but stripped of its original human-made collage art. In its place: awkward AI pictures and a cheery little prompt inviting visitors to "generate your own sorrows" with a chatbot. That upbeat gimmick only made people more suspicious, because fans say Koenig’s whole project is about the weird, deeply human experience of being alive — not machine-made poetry with extra fingers.
And oh, the comments were not gentle. One of the bluntest reactions called it exactly what many were thinking: "AI slop is a thief." Others said this is the kind of thing copyright complaints were made for, with one commenter snapping that DMCA takedowns are actually for this. A bigger fear also bubbled up: if someone can repackage a famous book with shiny new branding and AI garnish, what stops this from happening to novels, songs, software, or basically anything else online? The mood was half outrage, half gallows humor. One commenter compared the whole fiasco to those infamous crypto fans who bought a rare Dune pitch book and somehow thought they’d purchased Hollywood rights too. Translation: the community thinks this wasn’t just shady — it was embarrassingly, spectacularly shameless.
Key Points
- •A new website appeared to republish the full text of John Koenig’s *The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows* while presenting itself like an official book promotion site.
- •The site replaced the book’s original collage illustrations with AI-generated images made using DALL-E 2.
- •It added a “Submit A Sorrow” feature that used OpenAI’s GPT-4 to generate new words, etymologies, and definitions from user prompts.
- •Koenig originally launched the project on Tumblr in 2009; its success, especially through the spread of “sonder,” led to a Simon & Schuster book deal and a *New York Times* bestselling book in 2021.
- •The suspicious site used a different domain from the official project and, according to the article, was not linked from Koenig’s official Tumblr page or social media when it launched around August 2023.