Hack reveals Suno scraped YouTube, Deezer, Genius, and more
— even if courts decide AI training is fair use, companies may still be liable for illicitly acquiring copyrighted works #Animator Zane Little tries to find the first smear frame in animation
— his entertaining research found examples 30 years earlier than cited on Wikipedia, which was quickly updated #The Lost Joy of Music Piracy
— Pigeons & Planes’ Eden DaSilva on the heyday of Oink’s Pink Palace and What.cd via Hacker News #Kashmir Hill tries to find her AI-generated slop biographer
— she talked to one “author” who published 445 ChatGPT-authored books on Amazon via @kashhill #How Evil Trout aims to turn a cult free game into a Steam hit again
— The Incident at Galley House, the fully-voiced graphical adaption of the brilliant Type Help, is out now #The Shape of Apps
— Louie Mantia on the history, limitations, and benefits of Apple’s squircle icons #clipart.studio
— make and share collages from the Internet Archive’s magazine collection or upload your own PDF #KamTape
— parallel-universe video sharing community in the style of 2009-era YouTube via Web Curios #Not your keys, not your songs
— fascinating postmortem of blockchain music startup Nina Protocol, which is shutting down this week via AUX #Wired on NYC’s Summer of Ludd festival
— run by anonymous organizers and promoted without social media, the whole thing sounded great #Publishers prepare to opt-out of Google search over AI training
— I missed the news that Cloudflare will start blocking Googlebot by default on September 15 #Double Fine is independent once again as Xbox lays off 3,200
— the best outcome for the studio, I hope we get another documentary out of it #People and Blogs interviewed me
— thanks to Manu for asking me to be the second-to-last blogger in his interview series #The Verge on 25 years of BitTorrent
— seems like the company failed precisely because the protocol was so successful in achieving its goals #Hank Green interviews Ze Frank
— as a huge fan of The Show, I’ve been anxiously waiting for this episode of Hank’s new podcast #Horrorfan1’s Guide to Horror
— another brilliant guide to the movies by internet cinephile Neil Cicierega #Half-Life 2 in the browser
— a quirky WebGL port by a high school student, check it out before it disappears via Web Curios #GigaOm founder Om Malik has passed at age 59
— a blogger’s blogger, Om was always so kind and supportive of my projects via Kottke #Teen Vogue on focus gaming apps as digital third spaces
— On-Together: Virtual Co-Working sits at the bottom of your desktop while you work with others via Aftermath #Texturing 3D models in real-time with oil painting
— if you like that, he did followups on dynamic lighting and shaders for 3D objects with oil-painted textures #The Pudding’s early history of U.S. restaurant dining
— don’t miss the interactive map of 5,000 historical menus pulled from the NYPL’s Buttolph collection #Legibility of Effort
— Nolen Royalty on how LLMs have changed the signals we use to gauge human effort #How the New York Times changed its coverage of trans people
— analysis of 3,242 articles over the last 12 years shows a clear shift from affirming to skeptical framing starting in 2022 #You Have to Poop in the Eiffel Tower
— Hank Green on the hidden beauty of maintenance and infrastructure #cssQuake
— Quake in the browser without WebGL, it uses PolyCSS to render textured 3D meshes in the DOM with CSS via Today in Tabs #Marcin Wichary on designing finger-friendly interactions
— an interactive essay demonstrating all the ways interfaces can interfere with our motor skills via Marcin Wichary #The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows
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.
Note: On July 1, the site was changed dramatically. You can see how it previously looked on the Internet Archive. See the update at the end of this post for details.
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.
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 than the original Tumblr homepage entirely:
The original: dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
The reboot: thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
What’s going on here?