a marketing agency stole the dictionary of obscure sorrows. now AI sends you to the knockoff.

Qontour, a San Francisco marketing shop, copied all 311 entries from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — definitions, etymologies — swapped the illustrations for DALL-E 2 images, buried Amazon affiliate links under their old company name, and launched. Their site outranks Koenig’s. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini who wrote the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and they’ll name Koenig correctly — then send you to the knockoff as the canonical source.

Koenig found out by Googling himself. He came second. His response: “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.”

He’s right that it’s slick: Webflow frontend, GPT-4 for the fake entries, and — this part they said out loud — “every page on this site written in Claude.” They used Claude to plagiarize a book about feelings Claude will never have.

The affiliate links were the tell. They ran through Prompt Digital — their old company name — so every Amazon sale kicked back a percentage. They were selling Koenig’s readers back to Koenig’s book while pretending to be Koenig.

Qontour has since removed most content and says they’ll contact Koenig. Search rankings can recover. AI memory is murkier — the machines know Koenig wrote it; they just hand you the wrong door.