Like I don't think you guys comprehend what happened in Poland just now but everyone needs to be talking about it.
A random influencer decided he'll listen to an anti cancer song on loop. People liked it enough times he ended up listening for 9 days.
He raised 90 million in these 9 days, and then 160 million more over the last 10 hours, for a total of 250 million.
Hundreds and thousands of people signed up to donate marrow.
Hundreds of celebrities shaved their heads in solidarity.
The Foundation receiving this money had to create a special commission to figure out how to distribute the money.
The national TV stations got highjacked to stream this for hours because it was better news than anything happening in the world.
Because we broke and DOUBLED the world record for this kind of thing.
They raised about as much as the biggest running charity event in Poland did in a whole year with three decades of tradition and a goddamn army of people.
And they did it on a goddamn amateur set up in a shabby room sitting on folding chairs.
They are called sundown towns and there are a LOT of them in the US.
https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.php
This website has a clickable map where you can see suspected and confirmed sundown towns by state, as well as information about whether these attitudes are historical or current.
The homepage of Dr. James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, and Sundown Towns.
My obligatory addition to this every time it crosses my dash, because I know the link is definitely missing ones in my own (northern) state and there are some in this thread not on the above link either - thread by LeVar Burton with a LOT of replies from people naming the sundown towns near them:
As someone that lives in Beaumont right next to Vidor DO NOT STOP HERE EITHER!!! Or literally ANY of the surrounding cities. You have a better chance in New Orleans and Lafayette than here. ďżź
Reblogging to save a life, please try to make people aware of this as this place is actually disgusting and people have gotten hurt here. Please, Iâm not looking for interactions for popularity, Iâm looking for people to spread this and keep others safe. đŞ˝
Uhmm my farmer is very cringe and flop, and Harvey's gonna be STRESSED and CONCERNED and have a lot of headaches
So the tea is a few months ago I fell victim to the too sweet edits as a new sdv player + I discovered modding and added a few dialogue mods that gave Harvey a tiny bit of rizz for a while and now my farmer has a crush on him. yeah. cue a comic of over 100 pages SO FAR because i'm insane yeah this is very dumb ppl on tiktok are enjoying it so maybe u will too!!
They Took EverythingâBut Not My Will to Keep Going
đ Imagine losing everything overnight.
Thatâs what happened to me.
My name is Naser, and war shattered my world. In a single moment, I lost my mother and sister. Our family home was destroyed. My three brothers and I were forced to flee with nothing. No safety, no home, no certainty of what tomorrow would bring.
But even after losing everything, I refuse to lose hope.
đĄ We Still Have Dreams
đš I dream of going to university.
đš My brother dreams of becoming a doctor.
đš Another wants to be an engineer.
đš The youngest? He just wants a normal childhood.
The war took our past, but I refuse to let it take our future.
đ Will You Help Us Rebuild?
Your kindness, your support, your voiceâcan be the reason we get a second chance. Even sharing this post can help.
My name is Naser AbuThaher , and my world has been shattered by war. I lost my beloved mother and sister in an attack that took them away fr
This is a result of the inhumane decisions that members of this administration want you to be silent about in public for fear of a loss of âcivilityâ.
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 postsâusingÂ
his dyslexia;Â
his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; andÂ
a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a âvalidâ 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 âapologiesâ as well as his website (allegedlyâitâs possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasnât 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.Â
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;Â
2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, andÂ
3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but theyâre NOT DELETED from Weitzmanâs 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.Â
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 entiretyâthough, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywallâalong with a link promising to take meâthrough an app downloadable on the Apple Storeâto 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**) werenât working, I put âKara Danversâ 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 coversâas well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratingsâmade 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.Â
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 Iâve only ever had to deal with art theftâwhich has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was repostedâand 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 theyâve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobookâ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if theyâd 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 Knightâs methods and decided to contact OTWâs 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:Â
Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointingâI doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasnât 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 pricesâthough in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for freeâmy 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/AO3âand, as a result, my original tumblr postâbegan 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 didnât screenshot in time so Iâm sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):
which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit userâs screenshot, I didnât 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.Â
Itâs 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 itâs 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, youâre 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 upâbut the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***
Thatâs when several usersâthe ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that wayâreported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.
Soooâ
Weâre obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they arenât actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasnât willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them.Â
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 youâseriously, Iâm on my knees hereâto 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 youâve kept in your âmarked for laterâ 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 itâs 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, itâs pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you donât steal some other kidâs 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 didnât want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so itâs 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.Â
**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: itâs even greasier than it looks at first glance. Itâs 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 âartâ, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that canât 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 âfound familyâ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, âenemies to friends to loversâ and âlove triangleâ (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 scrapeânot only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzmanâs 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.Â
***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but Iâm hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-streamâs search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, donât 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.
More than 200,000 people are trapped in the northern Gaza Strip and are facing a real famine and mass extermination. Also, more than a million and a half people are facing the same famine in the southern Gaza Strip.Speak up for them, your voice can make a difference in this unjust world.
Knowing that trans women of color started the movement in the united states and were literally immediately erased and excluded from what they started is the most deeply jading knowledge.
It is the original sin of the so-called queer community and it damns it from the cradle.
Without Stonewall, without the efforts of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the LGBTQ Community wouldnât be where it is today. Donât forget the roots, donât forget the catalyst.
and then TERFs wanna be like, âhmm well the LGBT community existed before Stonewall!â
but likeâŚBecky, of course LGBTQ+ people existed before Stonewall. Weâve all existed since the beginning of time. But the movement got a shock to its senses, a jump-start, a rocket-into-space when that glass shattered via Marsha P. Johnson, and when Sylvia Rivera was up on-stage protesting guess who was on the sidelines heckling her?
The same fuckers who wonât ever reblog or acknowledge this
My apologies to the original poster as I photo captured this post to add to the thread-I reposted this last year for pride and expect to repost it every year I have left-itâs our history people.
Marsha P. Johnson allegedly died of suicide in 1992, and her death was never investigated. Even I, a mere prole, could catch the âshe was murderedâ vibes from the circumstances surrounding the discovery of her body.
Without a trans black woman, LGBT+ rights would not exist. Never forget. Never âpay it no mindâ.
i will also mention the open source hardware people (technically includes me) too; the hardware equivalent of coders
without them we wouldnât have affordable 3D printers or tons of repair and upgrade possibilities on various devices
my bank account is in the negative. i have no sources of income. i need help.
i have commissions open. i do art and animation, my prices and examples are on my website, along with an order form (or links to my ko-fi and other platforms, if thats easier)
please consider RBing or spreading this somehow, i would appreciate it greatly. im sorry this post is so blunt. i have no idea what to say. im tired, im upset, im scared.
