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 on 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 postsāusingĀ
his dyslexia;Ā
his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; andĀ
a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a āvalidā 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 āapologiesā as well as his website (allegedlyāitās possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasnāt 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.Ā
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;Ā
2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, andĀ
3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but theyāre NOT DELETED from Weitzmanās 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.Ā
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 justĀ 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 entiretyāthough, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywallāalong with a link promising to take meāthrough an app downloadable on the Apple Storeāto 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**) werenāt working, I put āKara Danversā 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 coversāas well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratingsāmade 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.Ā
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 Iāve only ever had to deal with art theftāwhich has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was repostedāand 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 theyāve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobookā YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if theyād 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 Knightās methods and decided to contact OTWās 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:Ā
Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointingāI doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasnāt 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 pricesāthough in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for freeāmy 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/AO3āand, as a result, my original tumblr postābegan 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 messageĀ :
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 didnāt screenshot in time so Iām sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):
which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit userās screenshot, I didnāt 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.Ā
Itās 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 itās 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, youāre 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 upābut the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***
Thatās when several usersāthe ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that wayāreported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.
Soooā
Weāre obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they arenāt actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasnāt willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them.Ā
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 youāseriously, Iām on my knees hereāto 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 youāve kept in your āmarked for laterā 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 itās 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, itās pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you donāt steal some other kidās 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 didnāt want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so itās 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.Ā
**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: itās even greasier than it looks at first glance. Itās 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 āartā, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that canāt 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 āfound familyā (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, āenemies to friends to loversā and ālove triangleā (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 scrapeānot only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzmanās 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.Ā
***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but Iām hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-streamās search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, donāt 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.
#do you think most people are so domesticated they have yet to find their bowl of snow?#people whoās talents lie somewhere outside all this#such as digging really nice holes
Lovely people of tumblr, if I may speak with my librarian hat* on for a moment:
If you are in the US, you may be aware that librarians are Going Through It because some malicious people believe in fascism and have decided to make that our problem. Whether you are in the US or not, there is something you can do to help your local librarians out:**
Say something nice to us.
You can post on social media and tag your library, you can find the libraryās main phone number and call, you can go in person, you can send a card (we display cards in our break room)! I guarantee you that you will make the day of the person you talk to, we will immediately go tell all our colleagues how lovely you were, and you will help us live to love and fight another day.
*it is a fetching piece of millinery in purple silk
**I propose we make this an international group project. Whether your librarians are going through it or not, we all appreciate a kind word.
The above advice remains one thousand percent true no matter where you are in the world, I would venture to say.
For those of you in the US, I am going to add that if you need a way to not feel helpless, getting involved with your library is a wonderful and *genuinely useful, will make a day to day difference in your neighborās lives* thing to do. Librarians are there to provide, vet, and guide you through reams of information. Give us a hand and everyone wins. This can look like:
- using the library and getting to know the staff
- if thereās a volunteer Friends group, join it! Or start one! These folks raise extra money for the library and often run things like book sales
- going to library board meetings and standing up during public comment time to talk about how much you love the library and the First Amendment
- if you have an elected library board, run for it. Usually the only qualification is you have to reside in the district the library serves.
- vote yes on library funding measures
Librarians have been fighting for your rights for years and while Iām sure some of us are tired, I have to confess Iām not. Iām full of love and determination and spite, in that order. Give us a hand and we can help keep each other safe and informed.
Co-signed, except if you go to a library board meeting and mention the First Amendment you may get a reflexive reaction from library folks who have experienced āFirst Amendment Auditsā which are pretty much staff harassment in the name of My Rights, so it may be better to specifically praise examples of free speech you see in the library.
Go in June and tell them you love the Pride displays. Go in February and talk about Black History month. Go any time of the year and say how glad you are to see diverse authors, queer representation, etc. say youād love to see more of those things, programs on those themes, all of it.
Library boards set budgets and policies and they NEED to hear from the part of their community that wants a drag queen at every storytime or they WILL decide they canāt risk pissing off the parts of the community who does show up to complain.
Is your library county funded, city funded, state funded, etc.? The government bodies which fund your libraries are the ones you want to be getting in touch with EVERY winter/spring (the new fiscal year starts July and often library funding for the year is decided late spring) to tell them how much you love the library and want it to have more funding. In more local systems, grassroots calling campaigns still work!
On that note: is your library seeking unionization? Once again, you can help by calling and writing to the local government responsible for your library system to tell them you support library staff having a workers' union. End of October is usually the deadline to sign off on a unionization vote, and officials sometimes need incentive to do so via loud public support.
What schools system does your public library serve? School library/book policies (such as challenges and bans) can spill over into the public libraries as well-- but school libraries also need your support! Attend their board meetings and voice your support for the first amendment whenever possible.
Are there library board spots up for grabs? This is a crucial time for a library. Sometimes a system allows for voting in the board members but most systems simply hire someone via a job listing. In this case, contact your sitting board members and tell them you are a library patron and want them to hire someone who supports intellectual freedom and first amendment rights. Get all your friends and family to do the same. Attend board meetings and tell them, too. A single pro-censorship board member can do a lot of damage to a library system.
I know that was long but I hope it was helpful for readers who want to support their local libraries!
AMAZING additions. Iām especially co-signing the union support and running for library board. My library unionized about a year ago and two community members who got involved supporting us just ran for library board and won. Now weāll have two pro-union board members the next time we negotiate, and the board member who was the biggest pain to work with lost the election and is no longer my problem. Being a union worker is something that is going to help me stay in the same job for a long time and do good work for the long haul.
I'm on my local library board and honestly, it is so important. The board does more than pay the bills. We establish policy and we act as a shield for the staff when they execute those policies. If you support diversity, if you want to push back against book bans, if you want expanded services, then join the library board. In my time on the board we have:
Held drag story hour and pushed back against those demanding we stop
Pushed back against demands for book bans
Begun distributing Narcan
Established a partnership with a local medical group to bring a low-cost mobile dental unit to our parking lot
Established a partnership with several social services to help transition people out of homelessness
Established a Makerspace, Library of Things, and Teen hang-out space
I'm not (just) saying this to brag. I'm saying this to make you aware of what you can accomplish when you get involved.
I'd like to remind everybody that this isn't just about A03 or civil rights organizations. This could be applied to any 501 organization. That includes churches, schools, museums and library support organizations. All sorts of support organizations like soup kitchens or places like goodwill. Those are all non-profit organizations and they all have a 501 status. This is a threat to every civil organization we have that is meant to help the public.
So please contact your representatives. Please look this up on Twitter and click the link so you can call your representatives and voice against this. Because there's a hell of a lot more at stake with a bill like this than just ao3. People's lives could be at risk.
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