Those commissions may have been meaningful over the last few years, since the unofficial site is now the top search result for virtually every query related to the book, including the book’s title, the words coined in the book, and even John Koenig’s name. In every Google search I’ve tried, the unofficial site ranks higher than the official site, the publisher’s site, or Wikipedia.

This is made worse by the rapid shift from traditional web search to conversational AI search, which is easy to manipulate, hides sources, and collapses context into simple answers.

ChatGPT and Gemini both link to the bootleg as the official website, and both claim that John Koenig is the one that created it...

But it’s not surprising to see it coming from an agency that has leaned into generative AI so heavily. As they proudly explain, “Every page on this site was written in Claude” using an “author persona” that they call “Q.”

What’s missing here is consent, which feels like the original sin of AI. As I’ve written about many times before, generative AI models are all trained on a massive corpus of human-authored works without attribution, consent, or compensation, extracting value from creators while centralizing power among a tiny handful of massive tech companies.

Source [web-archive]

Holy gracious smokes... no words may express the sorrow, awfulness, devaluation, absurdity, disrespectfulness... of the current times...
Thank you... dear Authors of these counter-action articles with investigations and truth, that present the... ineffable issues...
Let's also just... keep trying to stay human, accountable, and respectful... and... hope...

We use any tool to make the things we desire and a thing we have to admit is a large number of us desire profit even at the expense of the utter degradation of our cultural and actual environment. We are the only animal that doesn't know that you don't shit where you eat.

Such blazen plagiarism and profiteering from "fans" of John Koenig's work is abhorrent.

Of course this kind of thing existed before GenAI, but the problem is how easy its become to plaigiarise the work of actual creators by just prompting an AI to do it for you.