This was just an idea that grew legs and ran away. 'What if Hera, tired to her husband cheating, decided to not become his wife a second time when she is sent to the past. I have a lot more ideas on this if anyone is interested.
***
Hera is sent back in time to the beginning.
One moment the Mount Olympus was burning around her, falling into the Abyss as the Titans overthrow them as the Greek gods had once done to the Titans a thousand years ago, the next she was opening her eyes, laying on the ground, covered in her father Krones stomach juices, newly freed by her brother (and former husband) Zeus.
The battle is as brutal as she remembered it. Without thinking she rallies her siblings and their allies, and leads the charge with her brother, to defeat their father. She does not notice that she behaves as a queen should, but others do.
After the battle, after overthrowing the titans for the first (and second) time, once Olympus is built and domains distributed Gaia begins speaking of Zeus selecting a queen, Hera is quick to hide herself away, so far and so deep Zeus has no chance of finding and tricking her again. There would be no foolishness with the wounded bird act again.
Zeus dose not find her but Gaia dose,
“You do not wish to compete for the seat of Queen?”
“No”
“Why?”
“I am the Goddess of marriage,” Hera says, feeling the domain settle over her again as she speaks it into existence, “our new king is not one to stay true to his marriage vows.”
And it is true, one of the reasons she had rejected him so many times until she had no choice but to accept his hand was that she could sense, even then, that his marriage vows would mean little to nothing to him and then she had spent millennia forced to feel it every time he broke his vow to her, the Goddess of marriage, over and over and over again.
Gaia had looked at her, something almost like pity flashing briefly over her face before she vanished beneath the earth.
It was not until months later, when a message was sent to her, an invitation and summons both. to the wedding of Zeus and Demiter the soon to be King and Queen of the newly established Olympian Patron that Hera disregarded her disguise and returned to Mount Olympus.
There was a tension among the crowd that Hera notices the moment she appears but she does her best to ignore it. The wedding is as grand as hers had once been. Missing her royal blues and greens. Replaced with Demeter’s earthy browns and wheat golds.
Internally Hera thinks that her colours had complemented the wedding better, but she dose not dare to say anything. She is no longer the queen and something like that would get her punished by the new Queen.
She looked away when Zeus and Demeter left the festivities to consummate their marriage.
That was not her life, her place, any longer.
For the first time, the knowledge that he was bedding another did not feel like a deep ripping betrayal because this time-
This time she was still the Goddess of marriage, women, childbirth, and family but she was neither the queen of Olympus nor the wife of Zeus.
So why did a part of her heart feel heavy where she should feel light?
Reading up on him, he was a pretty cool guy. He was one of the first people to stand up to John Money about his theories of gender development and position that intersex infants should receive surgery and never be told about it using his abuse of David Reimer as ‘proof’, asserting that Money didn’t have the evidence and standing his ground even when Money straight up started screaming at him. And then later he was proven right when he got into contact with David Reimer, not only discovering proof that Money was wrong but also how abusive and horrific Money had been. He then went on to write advocating for intersex and trans rights and to avoid unnecessary procedures on intersex people without full informed consent and that intersex people are part of natural human variation and that we deserve acceptance and not to be treated like a disorder.
I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.
IN SHORT
Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.
When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using
his dyslexia;
his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and
a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,
as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.
When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there.
THE TAKEAWAYS
1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain;
2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and
3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again.
THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)
Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):
This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)
I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:
Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.
I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice.
I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.
After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.
While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:
And then I went to bed.
By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:
@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.
That response came only an hour or so later:
Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.
I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.
A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)
A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.
Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.
Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :
Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):
which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)
... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)
After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether.
It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:
And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.
That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:
They were completed works;
They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and
They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.
If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!
I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.
I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.
Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***
That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.
Sooo—
We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them.
This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:
Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.
Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.
THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):
*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that.
**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation.
***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.
Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.
I'll be honest--I forgot that the pump organ desk/bar was visible in the background, and it was NOT under $60.
It was actually $75.
The chairs, however, were paid for in human life. I inherited them; they were originally my great grandmother's. But they're not particularly rare-- you can find these exact chairs without a lot of effort, in reasonable shape, for not that much money. They made a lot of them.
Okay!! We have doordrobe! It's not quite done but after nearly turning myself into an hellpancake while carrying this in from the garage to the house, I feel like I should call it a night.
Right now it's not going into a secret room (but the Angel of Death (And WiFi) behind it does have a secret compartment for my router? Does that count) but Malice and Vice are still exploring it like it's a whole new world.
The House of Horrors continues to be...well, exactly what it is.
IMPORTANT: TUMBLR HAS MADE A DEAL WITH MIDJOURNEY/OPENAI.
YOUR ART AND IMAGES ON TUMBLR ARE BEING USED TO TRAIN AI MODELS.
The opt-in is automatic, but you can turn it off in settings.
Go to "Blog Settings" -> "Visibility" -> "Third-Party Sharing" and turn on "Prevent third-party sharing for [blog]". (This post shows how to do it on browser and on mobile.) You need to do this with every sideblog. (Note: The option in settings might not appear if your app hasn't updated yet. You can still opt out via browser.)
Spread the word. Everyone on Tumblr needs to know about this.
Please return us to a world where Notp and squick are used for a ship you don’t like instead of just making up a load of bullshit about how immoral it is or w/e lol
a short selection of concepts and phrases that used to be commonplace in fandom and we’d really benefit from making that a thing again:
NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.
Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.
YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.
DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.
SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.
YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.
As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.
(definitions lifted more or less wholesale from fanlore’s relevant pages)
Neil my dude, after showing my mother season one of Good Omens and my dad seeing a bit of it I mentioned you also wrote Coraline and either my mom or dad (don't remember which one said it) said you must have been a weird kid.
Could you please confirm or deny whether or not you were a Weird Kid™?
When you're posting a work on AO3, one of the options you have is to add relationship tags to your work. Sometimes you'll see tags that look almost exactly the same and you might wonder what the difference is.
A/B indicates that person A and person B have a romantic or sexual relationship in this fic.
A&B indicates that person A and person B have a non-romantic and non-sexual relationship in this fic - they are friends, colleagues, family members etc. who have a platonic relationship.
If you want to add more specific information about what kind of relationship the characters have in your story, you can use the additional tags or the summary to let readers know more about what they're in for.
Editing to add: Oh yes! And it doesn't matter which character you list first in your tag. They both filter the same way in the site's database.
So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????
I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.
Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?
Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.
Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.
