âBrooding person who only feels safe enough to let the mask slip around Sunshine personâ is alright, but we really do not see enough âSunshine person who only feels safe enough to let the mask slip around Brooding personâ.
I HIGHLY recommend Best Knight Ever by Cassandra Gannon. You get 432 pages of enemies-to-lovers sunshine himbo and grumpy warrior on a desert adventure with strong 1999 Cinematic Masterpiece The Mummy vibes.
You CANNOT separate art from the artist when the artist is still alive and producing new media to profit off.
So on that note, do NOT watch the new Harry Potter series. Do not hate watch it. Do not watch it because âitâs going to be my childhood remadeâ. I do not care. Do not watch it. This is a direct move to erase the original trio who have all stood against jkr.
you were a woman yesterday. you're a woman today. you're a woman tomorrow. you're a woman forever.
trans women have existed long before those stuffy bigots sitting in a court room have. trans women will continue to exist long after they're dead and rotting in the earth.
Quietly losing my mind over the fact that Elon Musk has straight up orchestrated a coup of our executive branch and like....I don't even know what, if any, system we have in place to fix this. Like... He's just taken control of the money and locked out the actual appointed officials. What the fuck.
Nazis are taking over my government, and like, not even just the Nazis we fucking elected! And I'm...making hamburgers? Because somebody has to make dinner? I just feel completely unhinged.
If you're wondering, there is plenty to be done about it, and plenty being done about it already, even if it's not happening instantly in a way you can perceive.
Reblogging because this is an excellent article that both tells you about some of what's being done and breaks it down in a way that will help you understand and think about future action. Please read!
musk is going to die in a Tesla explosion in 6 months after sticking his nose where it doesn't belong and we will never get a conclusive answer on whether it was a CIA car bomb or just a normal Tesla malfunction
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 listed.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.
If youre a black woman and you ever find yourself in a public conflict with a white woman I want you to try something, cry first. Cry first. Cry like youâve never cried before. You be the damsel in distress first. I did this in accident once (I was genuinely in distress) and when I tell you this white bitch looked like she was going to self destruct. She was damn near shaking as people were being nice to me and ignoring her. She even tried to start crying herself to see if her old tricks would work but it was too late. I was the damsel in distress and she was the bitch. Iâll never forget that interaction as long as I live.
This is specifically a racialized conversation. This is not generic advice applicable to just any woman. Presenting this as good advice for any woman ignores that this is already a modality of white womanhood used to manipulate and terrorize black women. While Iâm having a light hearted conversation amongst black women, this is a very serious topic. White women and their tears have quite literally on many occasions resulted in mass violent death in black communities. This is not a conversation that you can deracialize and Iâm starting to get pissed off.
"white women weaponize their white tears against women of color" you are not talking about a person, you are talking about the fucking Terminator. a statement like this is an abysmally racist and outright sociopathic way to view an entire race of people. please touch grass and interact with other people.
also, bonus points for flipping out at the mere mention of an alternative opinion you do not agree with on a public post on a public website.
this post is a much more damning portrayal of OP than of white women
"I started crying because I was actually in distress and this WHITE BITCH started crying too!!" my retard in Christ, did you consider that she was experiencing this thing called "empathy"? some people become distressed by seeing others in distress. it's not universal but it's also not rare. not every emotional response is a manipulation tactic
every time i listen to âyouâre a mean one mr. grinchâ i canât help but sit there and think âwhat did the grinch do to hurt you?â because dude just stands there for 2 minutes and 58 seconds and drags the grinch into the dirt
you know what if someone told me i was a three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce iâd probably be bitter enough to steal christmas tooÂ
Interestingly, though The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is narrated by Boris Karloff, the big musical number is sung by the late Thurl Ravenscroft - an American voice actor better known as the voice of Tony the Tiger.
My headcanon is that the Grinch and Tony the Tiger had a bad breakup, and âYouâre a Mean One, Mr. Grinchâ is the resulting breakup song.
Youâre not bothered?? Iâm not only not bothered, Iâm freaking invested. Iâm having actual empathetic sadness for The Grinch. I want them to go into coupleâs counseling. I want the âten years laterâ when Tony visits Whoville on business and meets the reformed Grinch whose heart has grown 3 times its usual size. I want them to reminisce over a shared dinner of roast beast and wine, then spend a drunken night together, then realize that maybe things are different and people really do change. I want a 3-act story where thereâs a long dark night of soul searching and the realization that maybe weâve all got a little bit of bad banana with greasy black peel inside us, but that doesnât mean we canât make a damned fine banana bread if someone will give us a chance.Â
legal disclaimer that I'm not saying we should execute CEOs in the street, but what if we doxxed them. what if we plastered their names and faces all over social media. what if we made them nervous to go out in public for fear of actually experiencing a single consequence for their actions. what if we built a culture where CEOs get regularly bitch-slapped in the street is what I'm saying
Good post, OP, and if you ever decide to do another may I please suggest âNOT IN HEBREW IT DOESNâTâ as a punchline? So much of the Old Testament is HORRIFICALLY translated from the Tanakh, it drives me batty.
Okay, so, strictly speaking, the infamous Leviticus 18:22 does say âforbidden.â Hereâs the thing:
1) The word translated as âforbiddenâ is âtoevah.â While that translation isnât ⊠wrong, itâs sort of like saying âMcMansionâ means âreally big house.â There are a lot of connotations in that word. The specific issue with toevah is that we ⊠sort of ⊠donât know anymore exactly what it meant. Based on context, it seems likely that the word referred to something ritually forbidden. This part of Torah was written not only as a guide for future generations, but also to say âso, look around, see your neighbors? DONâT DO THAT.â Thus, if we interpret âtoevahâ to mean something thatâs forbidden to do as a ritual before G-d, then the verse says nothing whatsoever about Adam and Steve and their two kids and their dogâitâs saying you shouldnât have sex with another man in the Temple as a sacrifice.
2) Following the same âthis is ritually forbiddenâ logic of toevah, this verse may also be interpreted as âdonât do sex magic,â which was a thing in. Like. A lot of fucking cultures at the time.
3) Hebrew is a highly gendered language, and the grammatical gender in this verse is really really weird. One of the âmenâ in this verse is given female grammar. Why? Who fucking knows, man, this isnât the only grammatical oddity in Torah. (There are also places where G-d is referred to as plural, and also as female.) One suggestion is that this is a way of creating a diminutiveâthat is, that the verse should be read as âa man should not lie with a boy.â Now, itâs worth noting that modern secular scholarship has concluded the written Torah was written down around the 6th century BCE, and most non-Orthodox Jewish scholars are like âyeah, all things considered, that sounds pretty legit.â
Do you know what else was happening around the 6th century BCE? What laypeople tend to mean when they say âancient Greeceâ was happening.
Do you know what happened a lot in that time period in Greece? Dudes forming relationships with younger boys, like ages 10-15, and using them for sex in exchange for financial gifts, mentorship, etc. While we donât know just how young some of these younger boys may have been, we do know some were prepubescent. In light of this, and also something I mentioned under the first pointââsee your neighbors? DONâT DO THAT,â if this verse is interpreted to say âa man should not lie with a boy,â then itâs pretty clearly âmy dudes, my fellows, my lads, donât be fucking pedophiles.â
4) Because of the grammar I mentioned in #3, itâs also possible that âshould not lie with a man as with a womanâ is actually referring to a place, not an abstract personhood: a man shouldnât have sex with another man in a womanâs bed. In the time period, a womanâs bed was sort of likeâthat was her place, her safe sanctuary. It was also a ritually holy place where babies were made. By having sex in her bed, youâre violating her safe space (and also introducing a man who may not be a male relative, thus forcing her into breaking the laws of modesty). If this verse is read this way, then it should be taken to mean âdonât sexually violate a womanâs safety and modesty.â
5) And as an offshoot of #4, this may be a second verse relating to infidelity. Which womanâs bed is any random dude in 600 BCE most likely to have access to? His wifeâs. But laws were administered differently based on whether the person they pertained to was slave or free, male or female, and so onâthus, a man committing adultery with a woman would be treated differently than man committing adultery with a man (especially because the latter would carry no chance of an illegitimate pregnancy).
So youâll note, there are a lot of ways to read this verse, and only a one-to-one translation with no cultural awareness produces âbeing gay is wrong, all of the timeâ.
(Youâll also notice the word âabominationâ is nowhere to be found. Thatâs like ⊠a straight-up fiction created for who only knows what reason.)
Apparently tumblr mobile doesnât want to show @prismatic-bell âs long and in-depth essay, so hereâs the screenshots, because it still shows up on mobile browsers:
Many thanks, @pulmonary-poultry. This isnât the only Jewish post of mine thatâs mysteriously stopped showing up in searches and/or vanished from my blog entirely, but it is the one I get the most requests to repost, so this saves me from having to rewrite the whole damned essay. @the-invisible-self, thanks for bringing it to my attention that someone was able to preserve the post!
