A San Francisco-based agency, Qontour, has allegedly stolen the entire text of John Koenig’s New York Times bestselling book, *The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows*, and relaunched it as their own. The new website replicates the original’s content but replaces Koenig’s photo-collage illustrations with AI-generated images from DALL-E 2, which exhibit typical artifacts. The site also features a user-generated AI word generator powered by GPT-4, allowing visitors to create “sorrows” with synthetic definitions and etymologies.

Qontour’s portfolio page openly admits to building the platform using Webflow and AI tools, while their copyright notice falsely claims ownership of the book’s content under a restrictive CC-BY-NC-ND license. This blatant misuse of intellectual property has raised alarms, as the unauthorized site ranks higher in Google searches than the official publisher’s site, causing confusion among fans and researchers.