rumi starts saying kill ten billion demons jutsu during their fights & “believe it!!” & Zoeys like ok u have to be so real with me rumi are u watching Naruto when u sneak off to brood & rumis like…….maybe. & then at like 1:03 am she sends a pic to the group chat of the ninja team & it’s Naruto zoey, sasuke rumi, sakura mira & mira IMMEDIATELY responds when she wakes up she’s like BC I HAVE PINK HAIR? bullshit. make me sasuke & rumi in her mind is like. this is bullshit I can’t explain the whole sharigan & demon shit . n rumi is like. no it’s me & zoeys like miraaaaa it’s bc of mine & rumis obvious sexual tension & rumis like………yeah that’s why
fox spirit whatever. anyway changed my mind Rumi naruto, zoey sasuke, mira Sakura & then the above convo is the same except zoey n mira are bickering over who gets to be sasuke & then mira is like sigh this is easily fixed. rumi is Sakura im naruto & zoey is sasuke
rumi cannot explain the demon stuff & so she sulks for daaaaaays about it
ok but after the reveal zoey resurrects the argument & she’s like ok so. rumi naruto for obvious reasons (THANK you zoey. FINALLY.) & mira is sasuke bc she wishes she could kill her whole village (wouldn’t that make me sasuke’s big brother what’s his face) & then IM sakura & i refuse to hear anymore arguments about it
anyway they go as the trio for Halloween one year & beg Celine to dress up with them & I can’t decide if she just put on one of the headbands or if she goes all out . Mira tells her that rumi is going as naruto & so she dresses up as like. the hokage or smth & rumi is like. why is ur costume better than mine & miras like. bc she’s richer than god. & bc I helped her. & rumis like WHY DIDNT YOU HELP ME??? I ASKED YOU A LOT? I WENT DOWN ON U FOR LIKE TWO HOURS???? & Mira’s like we both know that was more fun for you
the HUGE whiteboard where zoey explains the whole situation to celine (rumi = naruto because orphan, bonded to a demon, sweetheart) (sasuke - brooding, hot, gay) (sakura - underestimated, whatever, I don’t rmbr that much about her , healer? anger issues? waaaaajt mira u legit might be sakura??) gets leaked like SUPER blurry in the background of smth else & naturally all the fans are all over it & basically make the connection now between the demon stuff & rumi being “half demon” & it spirals bc they’re like omg everyone they’re leaning hard into the huntrx verse what do u think it means for rumi
& everyone’s like RUMI COMING OUT ?? but no one will agree as to WHAT bc it literally says “super gay” on the whiteboard so demon can’t be short hand for queer? unless it maybe is supposed to mean trans? but then their whole discography is suddenly suuuuper transphobic which seems not to fit with them being extremely trans positive all the time so the fans are stumped trying to figure it out & basically they decide that it’s about metaphorical demons like depression
so rumi is like. face down on the carpet like. our fans think im gay & depressed
& mira doesn’t bother looking up from her magazine she’s like you ARE gay & depressed
& zoey snaps a photo crouched next to rumi (still facedown on the carpet) & does a peace sign & posts it like. rumi being gay & depressed lol
anyway the fan war is appeased now that they know #queen rumi #gay & depressed
I love everyone’s suggestions on who celine should dress up as but you’re all wrong. she binge watches a lot of it “to support Rumi” who is like. PLEASE stop telling everyone I’m obsessed w this show, I just like to watch it casually (liar). & then celine makes an OC who is the hottest & coolest & most talented hokage ever & she takes the blurriest screenshots of different costumes to send to Mira to help her design the costume together & miras like lmfao u are JUST like Rumi it’s like. workaholics but the second u have to take a photo of smth it’s the most ass thing in the world. feat proof: ten thousand selfies from Rumi that are all like. Blurry cryptid zoomed in finger overlapping the camera
when /Shakra/ calls weavers "fierce", and Hornet thinks a child to be proud of is one ready to do murder from infancy- i really gotta wonder about how different the parenting styles might've been XD
recently my friend's comics professor told her that it's acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can't generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister's screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won't be able to generate a script that's any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.
It's only ever the jobs we're unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence lies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don't.
a.k.a. rumi finds an outfit that works and proceeds to buy atleast three copies of them
a.k.a. i started this because teasing ket saintelmo on rumi's duplicate wardrobe was really funny and ended this with my own face buried in my hands. please look at her.
three of the same shirt
short and long versions of the same hoodie
now lets branch out and this time have it in white
well hey its green-ish and doesnt have hoodie strings, its totally unlike her long brown hoodie
she also. has a short and a long version of her white turtleneck. possibly several short ones since she uses it onstage and at home
and don't forget the pajama pants from the same store <3
bonus: guess who she got it from.
miss 'its been two decades and i like two styles' celine.
it's so funny to me that people think Elphaba is the wise world-weary one when her first solo song is about how she can't wait to meet the President so he can make everyone stop being mean to her
meanwhile there's Fiyero and Galinda, whose first Fun and Light and Breezy solo numbers are two of the most jaded songs in the whole show
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 listed.
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.
