Just came back from my ROTS screening and I NEEEEED AU RECS
Hi tumblr fam. I need your help. I’ve haven’t been an AU-seeker of Anidala fan fics in 20 years.
But I guess my machoism finally reached its peak today. During my theatrical showing of Revenge of the Sith, I SCREAMED (in my head) at Padmé to Please please please don’t get off the ship on Mustafar. I come to you now a blubbering mess, needing your best recommendations of ROTS AUs.
I don’t even know where to start my quest. The archives on AO3 and FFN are massive. Help me, Anidala community. You’re my only hope.
The only plots I’m not interested in are time travel fics, especially ones where Luke and Leia are sent back in time.
I need Padmé to live and eventually be reunited with Anakin/her kids. Beyond that— Anakin still falling to the dark side/Anakin never falling to the dark side, Padme going into hiding/Padme openly leading the rebellion, Vader in a suit/Vader NOT in a suit, Padme faking her death, anything—all up for grabs.
Just plz recommend me a great AU Anidala story, with as faithful character depiction as possible (meaning Dark Padmé/Lady Vader is probably out, but if you REALLY think I should check it out, I will), and an eventual happy ending. 
There’s about a zillion things in my To Do list this weekend, but I keep absorbing and riding this high instead:
- Seeing Hayden Christensen get so much love (on his birthday!) at Celebration: Tokyo,
- Watching all the announcements and outpouring of love for Star Wars that’s happening over the live stream and social media,
- and as if that wasn’t enough (it is) going with the girls to Pride & Prejudice’s re-release in theaters (just one weekend before going for ROTS’s own 20th anniversary). Our showing was sold out.
This is the power of stories. This is the power of fandom.
Reposting because tickets went on sale today, and I RAN at them like Ani Skywalker sprinting to his wife like he hasn’t seen her in five months because BAE! IT FEELS LIKE WE’VE BEEN APART FOR A LIFETIME
Something cute I just found in the Star Wars Storyboards: The Prequel Trilogy regarding Anakin & Padmé and I wanted to share it!
In the concept art and storyboard for AOTC, Anidala have a parallel scene to Luke and Leia in ANH where they use a cable to swing past one platform to the other, and I can’t help but feel GL added this in the storyboarding process as an intended parallel and easter egg between the parents and their kids! And I really wished they had kept it in the final product of the movie!
{Peak Padmé holding onto her man classical ‘hero x heroine style’ as he uses the cable to descend them both safely to the ground 🥹🫶🏾 they invented romance.)
I can just envision it now, Anakin telling Padmé “hold on tightly to me. *bedroom eyes*…” as he’s getting ready to swing them down the chasm and Padmé just blushing up a storm 🤣
EDIT: This scene was even filmed but wasn’t included ultimately, and from what the crew members say, it was a quite ‘charming’ moment between the couple. here’s what they had to say on it;
Ben Burtt: "We had at one time, a scene where [Anakin] and Padmé fire a wire across an abyss and swing across together. It very much recalls the fun of the first Star Wars, and they were quite charming in this scene, because she had to hang on to him, and he had trouble getting the cable across; it kind of bounces off the first time and he has to reel it in and shoot it a second time and she's like 'Jedi, huh?'" [P/A's arrival on Geonosis. Note: he does say 'OW and Padmé' in the commentary, but given the context, and the storyboarding for this scene to back it up, it's quite obvious that Burtt had a slip of the tongue.]
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.
Hey folks, I doubt many people will see this message or the comment I left about it down below, but if you’re reblogging this post with death threats or calls for physical violence against this man, I am blocking you. I want this post to reach as many people as possible, and if you carry on like that you’re not just incriminating yourself, you’re giving tumblr reasons to nuke this entire recap. Thank you.
For the people coming in after Weitzman made the fanwork hidden to people who hadn’t signed up for an account beforehand, there does appear to be a way to see if your fic was lifted: searching for the fic title (+ your username maybe, if your title is a song lyric or something else used frequently) + wordstream will still bring up your fic if it was included in the theft:
Again, sharing this info is appreciated, because (understandably) I’m getting a lot of questions about this, and I will not be answering all of them individually. Share (and check back for) all additional info in the comments either here on on the latest Reddit thread if you can, because even useful additions in reblogs are difficult to keep up with. Thank you!
Cliff Weitzman says it will take a week from takedown for our work to be given back to us completely—minus that pesky little part where he fed it all to AI, of course! I guess we will all find out if he’s been telling the truth about removing the work by December 31st 2024 (seven days after the fanworks disappeared from view).
Speechify CEO Weitzman has yet to communicate ANYTHING about his website & app word-stream taking fanworks and then quickly hiding them when we found out—nor this announcement in the screenshot above—ANYWHERE PUBLIC, so let’s help him get the word out!
Weitzman’s ‘X’ account
Weitzman’s Instagram account
Weitzman’s LinkedIn account
Weitzman’s YouTube account
Note that he will likely block you (like he did me) if you tag his username directly, so make sure to hashtag #cliffweitzman, #speechify and #wordstream as well when commenting or making your own posts about the issue!
Also, I know nothing about TikTok and don’t follow fandom on YouTube, but if anyone knows anyone who might be interested in covering this issue there too, I’d be extremely grateful for you bringing this post to their attention.
-
ADDITION DECEMBER 29th: Works that were accessed previously by people who signed up to gather more info before Cliff Weitzman made all fanworks disappear from view are still accessible on his servers today. Also check the comments for more info as it comes in!
Update December 30th: all the works I personally saw were up on word-stream before they were hidden from view still come up in search results today and are still accessible as AI-generated audiobooks through his app to people who signed up for his app before Weitzman hid the works from view.
Also, this was an interesting find, when googling Cliff Weitzman + fanfiction:
You may remember that one of Cliff Weitzman’s arguments that his theft was somehow defensible was the idea that word-stream was ‘only in beta’. (See above for the screenshot of his message stating this). Really, Cliff? Then why were you already advertising the operation on your main platform two days before we discovered it? Why was its payment system fully functional?
Friends, if you really want to help, please, if you can, don’t stop at merely reblogging this post. The previous reblog above lists some things you can do to help this issue break containment and make Weitzman take accountability for what he did. As things stand, we’re allowing him to make this entire thing quietly go away. And as someone in the comments said, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could broadcast this issue broadly enough that whenever someone does an online search for this man, or his company Speechify, his theft is one of the first results to come up?
Weitzman is either willfully or carelessly risking bringing about the end of freely available fanmade media by attempting to monetize it. If he receives zero consequences for this, it’s going to happen over & over & over again, and eventually the IP holders of the source material are going to go ahead and stop tolerating widely accessible fanwork entirely. Can we try to help not make that happen? Please?
Amazing: thanks to youtackything on Bluesky, we have the screenshots of Weitzman’s advertisement for word-stream!
Again, this was posted to Speechify’s website (at what is now a dead link) on December 20th, a full three days before Weitzman tried to make the argument that he couldn’t be held accountable for his theft because we weren’t supposed to find out about it yet.
Also, to the surprise of absolutely no one, the listings of our works are still visible and fully accessible to word-stream members today.
Also: to the person who tried to add Cliff’s involvement with word-stream to Cliff’s Wikipedia page, I owe you one (really, dm me, I have an excellent recipe for banana bread) but sadly it looks like your changes were already reverted. Anyone out there with an older Wikipedia membership who wants to give it a try?
An asshole is using AI to scrap fanfics and originally published fics (like the kind you find on Amazon Kindle Unlimited, where Amazon strictly imposes an exclusivity clause, meaning if the author's work shows up elsewhere online they get in huge trouble/book could get yanked/account banned) for profit.
Profit. Ya'know, the only thing that keeps studios and their lawyers from coming after fans writing stories with their IP (intellectual property = their characters/worlds. If you don't know, big dogs like Disney--who has sued daycares for painting murals with Mickey or Iron Man--would absolutely go after AO3 and FFN and Wattpad but don't because writers and graphic artists don't financially profit in any way from their efforts).
There are so many things wrong with what this diseased fly on a bantha's poodoo is doing, but there are also ways good folks are working to stop him.
kianamaiart
gamechangershow
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
