I use the tag 'aoife's talk' for my posts | they/them | ao3 • she ra, the dragon prince, fullmetal alchemist, others • DNI if pedo/incest shipper/apologist
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.
@dianeduane I don't know if you saw this but there seem to be quite a large number of currently-working published SFF works here. Maybe you & some of your colleagues might want to take a look.
I have a family friend who worked at our local Salvation Army headquarters as a a secretary. This particular office took all the Christmas donations for children in need, put them in a warehouse, and on a designated day the staff and their friends picked through them all, taking whatever they wanted. She saw people hauling away bikes donated for specific families. Some local children had hundreds of dollars of gifts donated in their name, and on Christmas they received three cheap things, items likely not even from the person who sponsored them.
My friend quit, and I’ve not given them a dime of my money since then.
I deal with a lot of agencies who provide disaster relief.
I used to say the Salvation Army’s disaster services were the one (literally the ONE) good thing they did.
They would come in, set up a canteen trailer, make and pass out hot coffee and donated food in a disaster, usually being one of the first agencies to get there and the last to leave.
Then I found out.
Every time they did this, regardless of if they were actually invited or deployed by the agency in charge (usually FEMA, sometimes others) they would SELF-DEPLOY. Meanjng they would just show up. Ok. That’s not TOO bad, sometimes agencies have to take initiative and get there before the red tape is sorted out. BUT. They, after they left at the end of the incident, they would send FEMA or the host agency a BILL. They used one or two paid employees (usually the driver of the truck and a supervisor); and many VOLUNTEERS, but they would bill for EVERYONE’s Labor at standard federal rates. They would bill for the food they distributed even though it was all donated by another agency or private parties. They would bill for the coffee they made and the supplies. Except they would use electricity from the shelter location, water from donations or from the shelter, and in many cases, they would get the coffee and industrial filters DONATED, but bill for them at retail prices.
The Salvation Army is also ass to the workers. A good number of people join it, naively thinking that it’s doing good, and end up leaving cynical and beaten down. The management is hostile, if not outright abusive, and demand some ridiculous hours of it lower to mid-level staff. Don’t support these people.
Also just for even more horrific context on the original twitter thread?
Salvation Army reached out to Milknmuffins and asked what shelter she’s at with the promise to address the abuse in it. She…ended up saying where she was. She was thrown out onto the street. It’s also all on Twitter.
They invited her to a personal talk so she could explain the situation in person.
And then they threatened her with a screenshot of a rape-threat made supposedly by her:
And then threw her out into the street while claiming she broke house rules that
So yeah, the Salvation Army is a bunch of entitled assholes that will treat the most vulnerable like shit if they dare try to do anything that makes them look bad
The “Fuck Salvation Army” posts are making the rounds again, so conisder this your reminder:
Do. Not. Give. These. Assholes. A. Single. Fucking. Penny.
Google is going to start scraping all of their platforms to use for AI training. So, here are some alternatives for common Google tools!
Google Chrome -> Firefox
If you’re on tumblr, you’ve probably already been told this a thousand times. But FireFox is an open-source browser which is safe, fast and secure. Basically all other browsers are Chrome reskins. Try Firefox Profilemaker, Arkenfox and Librewolf! Alternatively, vanilla Firefox is alright, but get Ublock Origin, turn off pocket, and get Tabliss.
Google Search -> DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo very rarely tracks or stores your browsing data (though they have only been known to sell this info to Microsoft). Don’t use their browser; only their search engine. Domain visits in their browser get shared. Alternatively, you can also use Ecosia, which is a safe search engine that uses its income to plant trees! 🌲
Google Reverse Image Search -> Tineye
Tineye uses image identification tech rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks to find you the source of your image!
Gmail -> ProtonMail
All data stored on ProtonMail is encrypted, and it boasts self-destructing emails, text search, and a commitment to user privacy. Tutanota is also a good alternative!
Google Docs -> LibreOffice
LibreOffice is free and open-source software, which includes functions like writing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, formula editing and more.
Google Translate -> DeepL
DeepL is notable for its accuracy of translation, and is much better that Google Translate in this regard. It does cost money for unlimited usage, but it will let you translate 500,000 characters per month for free. If this is a dealbreaker, consider checking out the iTranslate app.
Google Forms -> ClickUp
ClickUp comes with a built-in form view, and also has a documents feature, which could make it a good option to take out two birds with one stone.
Google Drive -> Mega
Mega offers a better encryption method than Google Drive, which means it’s more secure.
YouTube -> PeerTube
YouTube is the most difficult to account for, because it has a functional monopoly on long-form video-sharing. That being said, PeerTube is open-source and decentralized. The Internet Archive also has a video section!
However, if you still want access to YouTube’s library, check out NewPipe and LibreTube! NewPipe scrapes YouTube’s API so you can watch YouTube videos without Google collecting your info. LibreTube does the same thing, but instead of using YouTube servers, it uses piped servers, so Google doesn’t even get your IP address. Both of these are free, don’t require sign-ins, and are open source!
Please feel free to drop your favorite alternatives to Google-owned products, too! And, if this topic interests you, consider checking out Glaze as well! It alters your artwork and photos so that it’s more difficult to use to train AI with! ⭐️
"So, take notes, Butcher Biden: The ancestors of the Ireland that you claim to be from disown you. Keep our country out of your mouth. And as for von der Leyen (President of the European Commission), and genocidal Germany with your words and deeds supporting Israel in the ICJ: Not in our name! The people of Europe stand with Palestine and with South Africa."
Clare Daly - Irish Politician and Member of the European Parliament - 16/01/2024
My friend, who doesn't know I have a tumblr (I don't think?), made a game. She posted that she's been slowly building her skills since 2020 all self taught. I'd like to share her latest project, hopefully some of you will download, play, and leave her a comment to help her out. The entire game was made by her, even the music.
"Pet is a horror visual novel about being in a city after a fun day out and how sometimes you gotta get home to take care of your cat. It's a late night on an unseasonably warm day. On your way home to feed your cat Kuma, you stumble upon a vending machine in a dark alley."
in my head after the events of camlann merlin returns to camelot and, still riddled with terrible guilt and grief, confesses to leon about everything that had happened and everything he had done, magic and all. and instead of outrage or betrayal or scorn or judgement (or even death, as he had briefly considered) leon shatters him with a deeply apologetic expression and a whispered “my friend… you must have been so afraid, and so tired.” and merlin collapses into heaving sobs against him and doesn’t get back up for a long time.
wait until you hear about leon taking every grief-drowned jab merlin throws at him with seemingly unending patience and kindness and steadiness until one day in the middle of a breakdown where merlin keeps abruptly vacillating between despair and fury he spits at leon “i don’t expect you to understand the loss, do you even care that it’s all gone? does it bother you at all?” and leon, all patience and kindness and steadiness disappeared, fucked off to god knows where, snaps “of course i fucking care! losing my king was losing my right arm, my lungs, my fucking heart! if i wasn’t so preoccupied with keeping you at rights i’d have long figured out exactly where the string of my immortality ends!” and then suddenly they’re both terribly silent
This one is complicated, but I hope you like it! If you get tagged, reblog with the meaning/origin of your url, your favorite color, and tag at least 5 people who put something on your dash that made you smile. Not just followers or mutuals, anybody that posted something that ended up on your dash. I’ll start.
URL: tribblemakingalicorn. I joined tumblr for Star Trek (Tribble) and KOTLC (alicorn). I’m also a troublemaker, so tribblemakingalicorn!
Favorite Color: Currently its any shade of teal to indigo. I’m partial to periwinkle.
Five people who made me smile today: @tikkunolamorgtfo @enbies-and-felonies @im-a-blood-sokka-for-you @make-kotlc-gayer @rowark
origin of my url: ok so i have a website for my art and on squarespace when you edit your website it gives you a custom url that only you can see, so my tumblr url is a variation of that💕
favorite color: orange!!!!!!🧡🧡🧡
tagging: @pinepickled and @juubiobito for this one💕
URL: Red Noki from super mario sunshine. I gave her the persona of stripping and doing crystal meth when i was like 8. The username stuck my whole life.
url: i had had the url asami-sato-has-never-sinned for a while so i was getting kind of bored with it, but i couldn’t think of anything else good, so i kept it for the time being. but i was thinking about url ideas about legend of korra while i was trying to go to sleep and it literally just came to me. i scribbled it out on a sheet of paper and immediately went back to bed-i changed it the next morning
favorite color: idk if this counts but i really like the color combo of blue and white
5 people that make me smile: @the-love-yourself-journal @ssokkas-instinctss @freedom @falling-chandeliers @zombiejune
i didn’t get tagged but i still thought this would be fun
url: lotuss—flowerr. I use this url or a variation of it on a lot of accounts. lotus’ are one of my favorite flowers and also the white lotus from atla! the white lotus didn’t inspire the name its just a happy coincidence
favorite color: lavender
5 people that made me smile today: @bigender-spooki @linbeifuckmeup @chief-yue @wukorights @sokka-with-his-hair-down
URL: I had just seen a post about princess yue taking over the northern water tribe as chief and was inspired. I was actually really surprised that the name was available!
Favorite colors: purple, light pink, and mint green
People who made me smile today: @pianjeong @azuzula @azulasflames @nerdasami @spoopykyoshi
URL: Savitarius! It me! Savitar is also a character from the Dark Hunters books series by Sherrilyn Kenyon and I really liked his name and character so I kinda claimed it as my own?
Favorite colors: Black and Purple
People who make me smile: @rynliadon @padme–amygdala @didsomeonesayhyperfixation @strigimint @fandoms-stan
usually i dont do these but what the heck ill join in fhgf
url: strigi is part of strigiformes, owls. mint is my favorite color, so throw them together and you get strigimint. not stringmint, please stop calling me that
URL: I really like Avatar the Last Airbender and made this a Zukka blog but I wanted to make a url involving Zuko’s honor
color: red
Five people who made me smile today: @nothing-more-than-hot-leaf-juice @macross-82 (I saw a cat video, I’m a sucker for those) @miyuki-scourgeofthefirenation @drama-queen-supreme @mars-is-bad
URL: when my friend finally got me to make an account, i asked her what my url should be she came up with mars-is-bad randomly and it’s still the url i use today because im afraid of making a commitment to a new one
Favorite color: grey, and sometimes maroon
Some people that made me smile today: @crashing-meteors @kurapikaschai @jockvillagersonly and some other people that have already been tagged!!
omg @mars-is-bad thanks for the tag! i’m so glad i made you smile, i didn’t even know! ☺️
URL: my url for my first ever tumblr was something like “girl of stars”, and then i deleted and my second tumblr url was “the girl among the stars” and tyra got hacked, and now there’s nothing like that that doesn’t have a bunch of hyphens and underscores, so i decided to sty in the astronomy theme and picked meteors. a long story for a boring event lol.
Favorite Color: dark green and soft yellow. i’m repainting my room soon and i’m excited to make it a light yellow.
Five People Who Made Me Smile: @svgasuga @azenkii @aroacebitchboi @earringsokka @annalise-inks if you’d like to!
thank you so much for tagging me, @crashing-meteors !!! i’m so glad i could make you smile 🥺💞
URL: baha honestly this is my bts stan twt username, and i came up w it bcz i wanted to combine the stage name of my two biases, taehyung and yoongi (v and suga, respectively). the first thing i came up with was “svgasuga” and it’s been my twt username for three years, and i recently created this tumblr so it’s been my username for … a few months !!
favorite color: dark/forest green and dark brown!! forest vibez, babey!!
five+ people who made me smile: @bluberry-spicehead @zukkababey @overcomewithlongingfora-girl @koala-otter @honey-bow @foyal @engagedzukka @bleekay @tikmasjiens @hollypunkers !!!!
cfvgbhnj thanks for the tag
URL: I love honey, and Bow from spop is such a dear. honey plus bow makes an awesome combo (and i’m not online enough to think of a good new one)
favourite colour: oof it changes all the time but currently it is green, but a few specific shades
tagging @scorpia-fan-no-1 @gothlit are the two I can think of off the top of my head bgfjdkgnkjf i really am not online too much
Would be nice if a single Arthurian legend was actually set in Wales. like Arthurian Legend pre-French romance is AGGRESSIVELY Welsh. The first mention of King Arthur is in Welsh myth, the queens name is Guinevere which is a French version of the Welsh Gwyneth (or about 1000 other welsh girls names that start with Gwyn or Gwen), Merlin is derived from Myrddin (pronounced Mir-thin), Arthur is likely derived from the old Welsh words for Bear and Man, even the name Avalon bears a not insubstantial resemblance to the name of the Welsh netherworld Annwn. Fuck you can even go hunting for Arthurs final resting place in the fucking hills of North Wales
King Arthur is a Welsh legend.
but EVERY. SINGLE. adaptation of Arthurian legend made for screen is English, English, English. its set in England or fantasy England, the actors have English accents and its couched in Christian English culture
it would just be nice for once if they could do a King Arthur actual set in Wales
but then the whole world seems to just forget that Wales is an actual country separate from England (which ooooh don’t even get me started on the ‘Wales is just and Annex of England’ or imma punch a bitch), and it deserves to have its last remaining national legends returned to it
I mea England stole or erased all of Wales other legends, can you not give my ancestors back one fucking thing?
