It is with the deepest frustrations that I must report Microsoft has pushed out Copilot onto Microsoft Word no matter what your previous settings were. If you have Office because you paid for it/are on a family plan/have a work/school account, you can disable it by going to Options -> click on Copilot -> uncheck 'Enable Copilot'.
(Note, you may not see this option if you haven't updated lately, but Copilot will still pop up. Updating should give you this option. I will kill Microsoft with my bare hands.)
In addition, Google has forced a roll-out of it's Gemini AI on all American accounts of users over 18 (these settings are turned off by default for EU, Japan, Switzerland, and UK, but it doesn't hurt to check).
To remove this garbage, you must go to Manage Workspace smart feature settings for all your Gmail/Drive/Chat and turn them off. Go to Settings -> See all settings -> find under "Genera" the "Google Workspace smart features" -> turn smart feature setting off for both Google Workspace and all other Google products and hit save. (If you turned off the smart settings in your Gmail, it never hurts to open Drive and double-check that they're set to off there too.)
Quick Edit: I found the easiest way to get to the Smart Feature settings following the instructions above was to do it through Drive. Try that route first.
Now is the time to consider switching to Libre Office if you haven't already.
Okay, all other Microsoft settings addition: If your Microsoft 365 apps don't yet have the Enable Copilot checkbox, you can turn off Copilot by changing your account privacy settings. This worked when I tried it, but it's a fucking pain.
In your app (for example, PowerPoint), go to File > Account > Account Privacy > Manage Settings.
Under Connected experiences, clear the Turn on experiences that analyze your content checkbox.
If you're using Word365, they've really buried this option. Wow.
From the File menu, choose More, then Options:
Then from Options:
Go to Trust Center -> Trust Center Settings -> Privacy Options -> Privacy Settings...
...where FINALLY you get to the "Turn on optional connected experience" feature which is the thing you want turned OFF. This prevents (for now) Copilot integration with Word.
Holy god, what a deep hole they buried this inside.
Accurate as of January 20, 2025
(Word 365 v2412 build 18324.20194)
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.
As a heads up I have made it a policy over the years to leave my Ao3 open and my works off of private. I've tried my best to try and make stuff accessible. But man, learning that now in addition to scraping for learning stuff, some asshole company is stealing fanworks to make AI generated audiobooks without permission...
I know I'm not likely to be hit, but I'm just tired at this point. I'm done. I'll be putting everything on both of my Ao3 accounts behind a privacy lock. If you've been reading as a guest over the years, DM me and we can try and set you up with an Ao3 invite.
It isn't much and won't guarantee protection, but it's something and I'm finally at the point of doing it.
The Heritage Foundation have outright admitted they intend for """The Kids Online Safety Act""" to be weaponized against LGBTQ+/abortion information and any form of seggsual expression on the internet, that is IF the drump wins the election in November.
KOSA very recently passed the "mark up" stage in the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, and now, according to the EFF, the bill is being considered in the US House this week. So now is the perfect time to call/pester your house representatives to shoot this unconstitutional bill down for good.
If you're unsure of how to contact and make your piece known to your House representatives, here's a handy resources guide, complete with call scripts written specifically for democrats and republicans!
Make no mistake, this bill will not just affect millions of people in the states, this will also affect the wider web across the world. So for international folk, you can also sign the petition here!
I believe taking these actions may end up working, because even House representatives are beginning to doubt this bill is in anyway a good thing actually. All we have to do now is pile on the pressure!
There is no sugar coating this bill, and more and more people are starting to see it for what it is; KOSA is a trojan horse for internet censorship.
Call your representatives and demand they kill it once and for all.
meant to post about it earlier, but all of the missing trocadero albums / tracks have now been reuploaded to all your favorite music sites (apple music, spotify, youtube, bandcamp) flying by wire and ghosts that linger not pictured because they never went anywhere
recovery: I and recovery: II cover chorus and season 14/the shisno trilogy respectively
this is a great reminder to support trocadero (and all your favorite artists) on bandcamp so that you can actually have proper downloads of your favorite songs! make bandcamp fridays important on your calendar :)
there’s a bonus album on the way at some point that will have a bunch of scrapped/extra material on it, but no idea when that will come out. and all the jeff williams stuff is still MIA, but (for rvb at least) is easily findable through reuploads on youtube
EDIT: Roses are Red, Violets are Blue: 20th Anniversary IS UP ON APPLE MUSIC/SPOTIFY/YOUTUBE
I should have checked before I hit post on the first version, lol. Deleted and re-posted to try and keep the new version going around. This is the original album + 11 Instrumental Tracks! thank you @joltning for mentioning the auto-generated youtube videos in your tags, which prompted me to look.
The songs with Instrumental versions are
Blood Gulch Blues
Steady Ride (Gunmetal Green)
Spiritual
No One - previously on the s14 soundtrack
A Girl Named Tex - previously on the s14 soundtrack
Space Invader
(617)
Superhero
Vale Deah
Half Life - previously on a chorus soundtrack, I think
Anyways, the rest of the uploads are being worked on, and this will include bonus material as well!
This is coming in the form of three albums;
Recovery: Volume 1, which will be seasons 12-13
Recovery: Volume 2, which will be seasons 14-17
and Recovery: Volume 3 which will be "unreleased orphans & rejects, cues from the show that didn't fit anywhere else."
so look forward to that! still no word on the jeff williams tracks as far as I'm aware, but this is fantastic news.
ETA: Preorders were added bc a lot of people wanted them! They are only added for the most requested. Thank you!
Hi everyone! My fanfic enamel pins are on sale! I'm not remaking these, so please tell your friends or grab one now!
There are MANY designs (including a fluff one I just recently added so there's no pics of it) and sticker versions too :) I also have mystery packs if you can't decide!
Any shares is greatly appreciated!
> Go to store!!!
Writing Into the Void @churbooseanon - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
