This might be a question for your followers, not just you, but is it the new in thing for people to comment on your fic asking a question or leaving a really good compliment and then going back to delete their comment after you've answered it?
Like one of them, they asked me a question about how I'm posting so consistently, I gave my answer, they responded saying it made sense and now I had another comment on the fic and noticed they'd deleted their comments.
A different commenter complemented the specificness of my fics, I thanked them sincerely, and again, they've now deleted their comment.
This has happened four or five times this month that I've noticed, is this new or are people just finally noticing my fics and therefore I'm only just seeing their weird behaviour? Because I do think it's a bit strange when all of the interactions are good ones as far as I'm aware, I haven't had a bad comment and I've always responded positively
I have to admit, I've never heard of this practice before.
It kind of reminds me of how bot accounts here on tumblr will leave a comment on a blog or like/reblog things to set up a history of 'normal behaviour' that is vaguely supported by real blogs (if we don't report them). That builds up credibility so that they seem legit when they attempt something more nefarious, whatever that might be.
I'm not saying that's what's happening here. Maybe there's a rash of people out there with a strange anxiety quirk that makes them delete comments that are well-received? I've heard of stranger things 🤷♀️
Have any of the rest of you experienced this? Or do you have any idea what's going on here?
I've had a commenter do something similar over the past few weeks, but they've been deleting their comments before I get around to responding. Sometimes I get the email notification and the comment has already been deleted by the time I refresh my AO3 inbox an hour or two later. In my case, it's not a bot getting nuked because it's the same account deleting their own positive and interesting comments and repeatedly editing others, and I just got a new batch of comments from them yesterday. Five of the seven new comments they left yesterday are still there, and I'm still none the wiser to why they're deleting some comments and leaving others up.
Hi! Do you have any advice for how to deal with negative comments that aren't strictly hate comments? I'm posting a very angsty fic, so i get a lot of playfully angry comments, but this one person is genuinely furious that i had half of the main couple marry someone else during a time loop, and they keep sending comments on the new chapters since then to complain about it. they said that they feel like the fic is pretending to be a ship that it's not, that the main couple is ruined now and they don't see how the story can go forward, etc. For the record i tagged it as a minor relationship since it's just one non-descriptive passage in a story very focused on the main ship, but they said that wasn't enough.
i'm sorry they're not enjoying the story, but i don't really know what to do since no one else seems remotely this angry about it and i've seen the same plot point in similar fics by other people. i haven't replied to any of these comments yet because i was hoping they'd get over it, but they keep sending similar ones. should i try to respond kindly or keep ignoring? i'd feel bad blocking them since they haven't really done anything wrong, but it's kind of ruining my experience of posting this fic.
i apologize for long this got >_< thank you for your time!
Hi anon! Sorry it's been a while since you sent this in. I hope it's not an issue anymore but if it is, I think you just need to block that user.
Blocking them won't stop them from reading your story, but it will block them from commenting on your work.
It's clear that they are having an outsized reaction to what you're writing and it's also clear that they don't have the ability and/or desire to stop reading a story that doesn't appeal to them.
It's not your job to manage the emotional state of someone you don't know. I know that sounds harsh, but in this case I think that's what's going on. They can't control their own emotions about your fic, and nothing you can do can control that reaction for them.
Does it suck that they won't be able to comment on anything else you write? Sure. But they've lost that privilege. At least for the time being. If you decide in 6 months or whatever that they've probably calmed down, you can go back to your preferences page and edit your block list.
Until then, do what you need to do to keep your piece. And to let this person know that they're not behaving well.
What do the rest of you think? Am I being too harsh here? Is there another option you see for this situation?
The negative-but-not-hate commenters I've gotten haven't been that persistent, but I have gotten a few of them off my back by replying with something along the lines of, "I'm sorry you don't like that aspect of my story. I'm writing for myself, though, and if you really feel that strongly about [insert thing here], this might not be the fic for you." For reasonable readers, that can sometimes be enough of a reality check to get them to regulate their own emotions. And if they're unreasonable even after a calm response like that, then the block button is ready and waiting.
Never let someone else take Jimin & Jungkook away from you.
AO3’s down again.
If there’s a fic you’ve been meaning to get to, LyricWinter lets you convert it to multi-character audio and download it in advance.
No Wi-Fi? Still works.
AO3 down? Still works.
Your favorites, their voices, offline.
GUYS ANOTHER GUY IS TRYING TO PULL THIS SAME SHIT AGAIN
USING AI IN CONTENT CREATED BY FANS OUT OF LOVE IS DISGUSTING AND THIS SHOULD BE TAKEN DOWN. JUST LIKE THE OTHER PEOPLE WHO HAVE TRIED THIS. NOT TO MENTION, THE VOICES ARE MOST LIKELY STOLEN
Oh, they're definitely stolen voices. From the "ethics" page on the app's website:
There's a section about how "someday in the future, we want to ethically compensate voice actors", but for the moment, they freely admit to taking the stance that users of the app being able to clone any voice they like is more important than making sure voices aren't stolen.
YES???? I HAVE A RIGHT TO MY VOICE. YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO YOUR VOICE. YOU DO NOT HAVE POWER OVER MINE. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO REPLICATE IT WITH AI. THIS IS A BASIC CONCEPT KNOWN AS CONSENT, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS LICENSING. YOU MAY LICENSE A VOICE ACTOR TO VOICE LINES FOR YOU, OR TO FEED THOSE LINES TO AN AI BUT YOU NEED WRITTEN CONSENT AND COMPENSATION
As a software developer myself I cannot comprehend the fact that you cannot understand even the most basic notion of a license
Same deal with the fics themselves. You cannot profit off of someone's works without a license
I decided to look thorough the reblogs, because today isn't a day for self care I guess, and I'm not done
It's a fucking fanfic, of course it belongs to someone! The service you're looking for is called 'having fucking eyes', because fics have the author right there and a good amount of authors have how they feel about 'ai derivatives of their work' on their profiles. And 'I'll keep it in mind'? Not 'I'll be sure to implement it'? But you'd expect this degree of laziness from someone making a fanfic theft machine.
Okay, but people can still send audio files. Authors saying they want their privacy doesn't mean 'don't send this outside an app' it means 'my stories are mine and please don't feed them to the theft machine.'
Translation: I'm here for the money. If you're not going to give me money, I'll very politely tell you to shut the fuck up.
Of course people hate but have no intention of supporting. That's why they're hating. This sucks!
I'll be sure to implement it. Sorry there's so many things in the backlog. I can't get to it immediately.
I am aware fanfictions belong to people. That being said many people put unpublished stories in here. Like many many people. It's as much an exploration tool as it is a modulator.
Supporting development simply means they are going to keep an eye on this because they want this to work. And they want to use this. That's what I want. I'm ok with people not liking the tool. But I wanna know if they would use it if I solved their concerns. Or if they don't really care for what I'm building at all.
Balancing practicality with vision is the difficult part. I understand the concerns.
"there's so many things in the backlog. I can't get to it immediately."
So until you build some kind of service that allows your app to see that users don't have writers' permission to feed their works to the theft machine, theft is just gonna keep happening, then?
"many people put unpublished stories in here"
That's concerningly vague. What percentage of your users are not stealing from other writers? How do you verify that? Are you just taking people's word for it? Checking the generated audio against published fanfic to actually see for yourself? How many people are actually using this thing, and how much theft has already occurred?
"I am aware fanfictions belong to people."
Are you really? Because allowing theft for now because you haven't built a system to counteract the theft sort of indicates that you don't respect that ownership, at the very least.
"I understand the concerns."
LOL. You haven't addressed the fact that stealing people's voices is inherently unethical (again, "deception" and "impersonation" are NOT the only problems with creating AI voice clones without consent. Maybe address that software developer who was trying to tell you about licensing), you're minimizing the fact that writers' work is being stolen by your users and fed through your app, and you're gaining profit through an app that uses 1) voices that don't belong to you and 2) stories that don't belong to you. With no systems in place to gain permission from the owners of the voices or the owners of the stories.
You're not the first AI grifter to come through fandom trying to solve problems that don't exist by stealing from writers and voice actors. If you're really that invested in audio as an art form in fandom, get a microphone and learn how to podfic like a normal person rather than trying to turn our words and our voices into a product.
Never let someone else take Jimin & Jungkook away from you.
AO3’s down again.
If there’s a fic you’ve been meaning to get to, LyricWinter lets you convert it to multi-character audio and download it in advance.
No Wi-Fi? Still works.
AO3 down? Still works.
Your favorites, their voices, offline.
The absolute audacity of this chucklefuck to say "people should get permission from the author if sharing an audio version of their story" while hawking a shitty AI app that CANNOT and WILL NOT get permission from writers.
Pal. Podficcers DO get permission from writers before creating or sharing audio versions of their stories. Deleting comments from people who point that out doesn't change that fact. You're a fucking hypocrite trying to profit off of stolen fanworks, and I hope you have the day you deserve.
The only comment I deleted was my own cause I made a typo. Lyricwinter is a tool that enables a new medium of audio.
It's on the users to use it responsibly, and I will do my part too.
The site is only done when I stop working on it, and as long as I continue to see many people happily using it day after day, I intend to continue development and improve it. I'm one person and until I can hire a team, development will be as fast as I have capacity. It's been 10 months of development and I don't even have a mobile app yet.
And if it's a feature lyricwinter users want, when I have time and hopefully a team, I'll make it easy to get notified if someone is publicly sharing an audio version of your work.
At present, all usage is private until someone shares a .wav file with someone else.
If you're not deleting comments, explain the fact that there are 11 comments on the post, but only 4 visible. I watched my own comment disappear seconds after posting it. That had to happen for a reason.
You have an "ethics" page on your website that claims to care about the creators it's stealing from and promises some type of compensation sometime in the future. If you genuinely cared, you wouldn't a) make it stupidly easy to misuse, or b) advertise the fact that users can steal other people's voices without permission.
You said "People should get permission from the author if sharing an audio version of the story" in response to... god knows what, since you're deleting comments. But you're advertising an app that does precisely the opposite, so you're a hypocrite regardless of whether you were referring to podficcers or not.
Get out of fandom spaces with your profit-seeking, tech bro bullshit. This is a gift economy, and the fact that you're selling an app that makes unauthorized voice clones to generate unauthorized audiobooks/podfics is completely contrary to everything this community stands for.
1. Idk I'm not deleting comments. It's a Tumblr bug then. Maybe people deleted their own comments.
2. This is in beta. I'm a solo developer and will add in features as soon as I can. If more people were using LyricWinter, I would have gotten investment and this would all be complete in a matter of months with a full team.
3. I have not publicly posted any works without consent in my advertising. Nor does the website enable public posting. I only advertised downloading audio for personal use.
4. I'm part of this community too. I built a tool out of passion. I built the earliest version of this without any intention of even making it available. Then i realized, hey - if I want this, then other people want this too. And I want to take it to the next level and that requires money. As I said it is very affordable already.
5. I do not condone deceptive use of voice cloning or impersonation. People write fanfiction and listen to it for meaning and psychological growth. In addition to that I respect a user's right to creative self expression.
I'm not going to let this displace VAs. I will make them mass passive income on scale if they want it. Whether they want it or not it will be an option. That said, they are not my primary focus, creative self expression is. The root of fanfiction itself.
Oh jee, I wonder if the fact that lots of people hate the idea of money and AI in fandom might have something to do with the low usership and lack of investments.
You advertise the ability to steal people's voices.
I don't believe you, but also, money doesn't belong in fandom, so the fact that it's "affordable" is irrelevant. Also??? $6 a month for less than an hour and a half of audio? $20 a month for less than seven hours?? Yipee! That'll keep someone busy for... a day, at most!
If you don't condone those uses of voice cloning, and you don't have any checks and balances in place to discourage or stop those uses (and you ADVERTISE the ability to clone ANYBODY'S voice), why have that feature available? If your app in its current state can't uphold the ethics you claim to hold, it shouldn't be publicly available.
How is plugging someone else's work into a glorified TTS program "creative self expression"???
1. I promise I didn't delete comments. I had issues w/ Tumblr yesterday when posting. My posts disappeared. And I had to post them again. Perhaps it's related.
2. Sorry I'm not understanding what you meant.
3. I'll do my best to balance things. I won't chain people who love voice. Also I don't consider fanfic writers thieves of character concepts. I don't consider fanartists thieves of character visuals. And I don't consider "fanvoicers" thieves of character voices. Because in all three cases, it is done without impersonation and without deception. The primary reason people have a problem with AI is because when AI does it, it can scale and negatively affect real people. I will protect against those harms. I get it, I haven't done it yet so I don't expect your trust. I will though.
Also to mention, the desire for character voiced audio was never being met at scale in the first place. So this really does create new economic value. Jevon's paradox.
4. $1 for 18 minutes is very affordable compared to the alternative. I will make it cheaper though cause I don't want anyone to not be able to use it every day atleast a bit. That being said, code doesn't run for free. Compute costs money. Making it cheaper isn't so simple as lowering the number. Certain providers for voice generation cost more money and certain cost less. The higher quality ones cost more. And I don't really want free users to get lower quality audio. I'd like to charge on the mechanism rather than the voice fidelity. Ex. Text length. Amount of text.
5. This style of content is very unique. It's unlikely to be used for deceit or impersonation. If someone wanted to do that, they should use elevenlabs. Also... lyricwinter audio quality isn't good enough to impersonate anyways.
6. It's creative self expression to me. That's all I can say. I love hearing my ideas and words turned into voice. And other people love self inserts where they can self insert their voice alongside the characters
Don't tell people who have issues with AI what their reasons for those issues are. You're not a mind reader, and you're being obtuse. It's not just the fact that slop being produced at scale is harmful to real people, the theft that occurs to train AI models in the first place is also a problem. IT IS NOT OKAY TO ALLOW YOUR USERS TO CLONE OTHERS' VOICES WITHOUT CONSENT. EVER. THE POTENTIAL FOR DECEPTION/IMPERSONATION IS NOT THE FUCKING POINT - THE POINT IS THAT REAL PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO THEIR OWN VOICES. If you can't see the difference between transformative works - taking a concept and a few character names and building entirely new stories around them - and stealing someone else's precise words or their actual voice for your AI app, you are the problem, and you clearly don't know fandom as well as you pretend you do.
Although that was a given from the start. Talking about creating "new economic value" in fandom, a place that isn't meant to have ANY economic value, is the biggest giveaway anyone could ask for.
Never let someone else take Jimin & Jungkook away from you.
AO3’s down again.
If there’s a fic you’ve been meaning to get to, LyricWinter lets you convert it to multi-character audio and download it in advance.
No Wi-Fi? Still works.
AO3 down? Still works.
Your favorites, their voices, offline.
The absolute audacity of this chucklefuck to say "people should get permission from the author if sharing an audio version of their story" while hawking a shitty AI app that CANNOT and WILL NOT get permission from writers.
Pal. Podficcers DO get permission from writers before creating or sharing audio versions of their stories. Deleting comments from people who point that out doesn't change that fact. You're a fucking hypocrite trying to profit off of stolen fanworks, and I hope you have the day you deserve.
The only comment I deleted was my own cause I made a typo. Lyricwinter is a tool that enables a new medium of audio.
It's on the users to use it responsibly, and I will do my part too.
The site is only done when I stop working on it, and as long as I continue to see many people happily using it day after day, I intend to continue development and improve it. I'm one person and until I can hire a team, development will be as fast as I have capacity. It's been 10 months of development and I don't even have a mobile app yet.
And if it's a feature lyricwinter users want, when I have time and hopefully a team, I'll make it easy to get notified if someone is publicly sharing an audio version of your work.
At present, all usage is private until someone shares a .wav file with someone else.
If you're not deleting comments, explain the fact that there are 11 comments on the post, but only 4 visible. I watched my own comment disappear seconds after posting it. That had to happen for a reason.
You have an "ethics" page on your website that claims to care about the creators it's stealing from and promises some type of compensation sometime in the future. If you genuinely cared, you wouldn't a) make it stupidly easy to misuse, or b) advertise the fact that users can steal other people's voices without permission.
You said "People should get permission from the author if sharing an audio version of the story" in response to... god knows what, since you're deleting comments. But you're advertising an app that does precisely the opposite, so you're a hypocrite regardless of whether you were referring to podficcers or not.
Get out of fandom spaces with your profit-seeking, tech bro bullshit. This is a gift economy, and the fact that you're selling an app that makes unauthorized voice clones to generate unauthorized audiobooks/podfics is completely contrary to everything this community stands for.
1. Idk I'm not deleting comments. It's a Tumblr bug then. Maybe people deleted their own comments.
2. This is in beta. I'm a solo developer and will add in features as soon as I can. If more people were using LyricWinter, I would have gotten investment and this would all be complete in a matter of months with a full team.
3. I have not publicly posted any works without consent in my advertising. Nor does the website enable public posting. I only advertised downloading audio for personal use.
4. I'm part of this community too. I built a tool out of passion. I built the earliest version of this without any intention of even making it available. Then i realized, hey - if I want this, then other people want this too. And I want to take it to the next level and that requires money. As I said it is very affordable already.
5. I do not condone deceptive use of voice cloning or impersonation. People write fanfiction and listen to it for meaning and psychological growth. In addition to that I respect a user's right to creative self expression.
I'm not going to let this displace VAs. I will make them mass passive income on scale if they want it. Whether they want it or not it will be an option. That said, they are not my primary focus, creative self expression is. The root of fanfiction itself.
Oh jee, I wonder if the fact that lots of people hate the idea of money and AI in fandom might have something to do with the low usership and lack of investments.
You advertise the ability to steal people's voices.
I don't believe you, but also, money doesn't belong in fandom, so the fact that it's "affordable" is irrelevant. Also??? $6 a month for less than an hour and a half of audio? $20 a month for less than seven hours?? Yipee! That'll keep someone busy for... a day, at most!
If you don't condone those uses of voice cloning, and you don't have any checks and balances in place to discourage or stop those uses (and you ADVERTISE the ability to clone ANYBODY'S voice), why have that feature available? If your app in its current state can't uphold the ethics you claim to hold, it shouldn't be publicly available.
How is plugging someone else's work into a glorified TTS program "creative self expression"???
Never let someone else take Jimin & Jungkook away from you.
AO3’s down again.
If there’s a fic you’ve been meaning to get to, LyricWinter lets you convert it to multi-character audio and download it in advance.
No Wi-Fi? Still works.
AO3 down? Still works.
Your favorites, their voices, offline.
GUYS ANOTHER GUY IS TRYING TO PULL THIS SAME SHIT AGAIN
USING AI IN CONTENT CREATED BY FANS OUT OF LOVE IS DISGUSTING AND THIS SHOULD BE TAKEN DOWN. JUST LIKE THE OTHER PEOPLE WHO HAVE TRIED THIS. NOT TO MENTION, THE VOICES ARE MOST LIKELY STOLEN
Oh, they're definitely stolen voices. From the "ethics" page on the app's website:
There's a section about how "someday in the future, we want to ethically compensate voice actors", but for the moment, they freely admit to taking the stance that users of the app being able to clone any voice they like is more important than making sure voices aren't stolen.
Never let someone else take Jimin & Jungkook away from you.
AO3’s down again.
If there’s a fic you’ve been meaning to get to, LyricWinter lets you convert it to multi-character audio and download it in advance.
No Wi-Fi? Still works.
AO3 down? Still works.
Your favorites, their voices, offline.
The layers of DO NO WANT in one blazed advertisment
An AI service to rewrite AO3 fics without author permission
AI voice narration when podfics exist! I'm a podficcer! fuck you for offering me sand as a replacement for all the audio art that I know and treasure and contributed to
GODDAMN JKR IP IN THIS DAY AND AGE fuck all the way off
Framing this as perpetual ownership of Jimin and Jungkook is so insulting to everyone involved
@ao3org taking a few hours to conduct maintenance is not a business opportunity to sell half baked apps to a community you don't understand.
Is this really what blazing is for on tumblr today?
This person has no understanding of fandom culture, oh my god. Fandom runs on the gift economy, on the sharing of our passion and artistic work. There is a reason why fandom rejects the very idea of AI-based fanworks, and the fact that some people don’t understand that and think they can make money of us and the work we create and share is laughable.
Fandom is not a monolith. I'm not an outsider, and you will find many varied opinions on many things. Gift economy is a notable part of it, but far from the only part of it. Regardless this does not take away from giving. Fandom does not reject AI as a whole, it is a segment that does. And, I have full will of being the best developer I can be. I'm gonna do my best to meet the needs of the community who chooses to use LyricWinter.
Using LyricWinter is incredibly affordable. It's 18 minutes of audio per dollar give or take.
Speech synthesis is not free to run. It costs money. A miniscule amount compared to the alternative. As do I. As do the team members I want to hire in order to create high fidelity audio experiences unlike anything available right now.
I love building this but I'm not going to go hungry for the sake of it. I do however provide plenty of free features cause I too used to be someone w/o a bank account.
"Fandom is not a monolith", and yet we're ALL supposed to be okay with our works being fed into your theft machine? Where's the opt-out option to bar your app from accessing our works? Better yet, where's the opt in? The default assumption your app should be making is "writers have not given permission for an audio version of this work to be generated." The (very, very few) writers who are okay with their work being fed through your AI nonsense can opt in. Leave the rest of us out of it.
You mentioned in one of your comments that people should have permission to share audio versions of stories, so put your money where your mouth is.
1. I plan to add a self hosted parsing backend for those who do not want their data going through external services. Been putting it off for months while working on other features. When enough users ask for it I will prioritize it. No users have asked yet, and writers do use lyricwinter.
Audio generation on sparktts is already self hosted.
2. I support user freedom to do what they want in their own privacy. Parsing backend aside, it is up to the individual how they interact with information. I will not censor creative self expression.
3. If there is a service I can query to see if a story belongs to someone and if they prefer to disable or enable redistribution on ai derivatives of their work, I will keep it in mind.
If such a service does not exist, I'm open to building one once I can afford a team. Right now it's not in my capacity and it would be unwise to wait for perfection before release.
Mind you, everything is private right now, by default. I have not given users the option to share creations via url yet. Only sharing method is a downloaded audio file.
A lot of people hate but have no intention of supporting development. If you do intend to support development though, I will keep your words in mind.
I will make it better as long as enough people who care are willing to stick around and use it.
Feeding someone else's work or someone else's voice through a glorified text to speech app is not and will never be "creative self expression". It's theft. Blocking people from stealing isn't censorship.
I have no intention of supporting your app because I'm one of the people it's likely to steal from. The same goes for most fanfiction writers, without whom your app would useless. We put in hundreds of hours of unpaid work to write our stories. The fact that there are a handful of people out there who want to use your AI nonsense doesn't make it okay for your app to enable them to steal from the rest of us.
Never let someone else take Jimin & Jungkook away from you.
AO3’s down again.
If there’s a fic you’ve been meaning to get to, LyricWinter lets you convert it to multi-character audio and download it in advance.
No Wi-Fi? Still works.
AO3 down? Still works.
Your favorites, their voices, offline.
The layers of DO NO WANT in one blazed advertisment
An AI service to rewrite AO3 fics without author permission
AI voice narration when podfics exist! I'm a podficcer! fuck you for offering me sand as a replacement for all the audio art that I know and treasure and contributed to
GODDAMN JKR IP IN THIS DAY AND AGE fuck all the way off
Framing this as perpetual ownership of Jimin and Jungkook is so insulting to everyone involved
@ao3org taking a few hours to conduct maintenance is not a business opportunity to sell half baked apps to a community you don't understand.
Is this really what blazing is for on tumblr today?
This person has no understanding of fandom culture, oh my god. Fandom runs on the gift economy, on the sharing of our passion and artistic work. There is a reason why fandom rejects the very idea of AI-based fanworks, and the fact that some people don’t understand that and think they can make money of us and the work we create and share is laughable.
Fandom is not a monolith. I'm not an outsider, and you will find many varied opinions on many things. Gift economy is a notable part of it, but far from the only part of it. Regardless this does not take away from giving. Fandom does not reject AI as a whole, it is a segment that does. And, I have full will of being the best developer I can be. I'm gonna do my best to meet the needs of the community who chooses to use LyricWinter.
Using LyricWinter is incredibly affordable. It's 18 minutes of audio per dollar give or take.
Speech synthesis is not free to run. It costs money. A miniscule amount compared to the alternative. As do I. As do the team members I want to hire in order to create high fidelity audio experiences unlike anything available right now.
I love building this but I'm not going to go hungry for the sake of it. I do however provide plenty of free features cause I too used to be someone w/o a bank account.
"Fandom is not a monolith", and yet we're ALL supposed to be okay with our works being fed into your theft machine? Where's the opt-out option to bar your app from accessing our works? Better yet, where's the opt in? The default assumption your app should be making is "writers have not given permission for an audio version of this work to be generated." The (very, very few) writers who are okay with their work being fed through your AI nonsense can opt in. Leave the rest of us out of it.
You mentioned in one of your comments that people should have permission to share audio versions of stories, so put your money where your mouth is.
Let's also note the fact that despite the fact that fandom is not a monolith, there hasn't been a single positive comment, reblog, or tag on this post. Not a monolith, but not exactly in conflict on this one point.
Never let someone else take Jimin & Jungkook away from you.
AO3’s down again.
If there’s a fic you’ve been meaning to get to, LyricWinter lets you convert it to multi-character audio and download it in advance.
No Wi-Fi? Still works.
AO3 down? Still works.
Your favorites, their voices, offline.
The layers of DO NO WANT in one blazed advertisment
An AI service to rewrite AO3 fics without author permission
AI voice narration when podfics exist! I'm a podficcer! fuck you for offering me sand as a replacement for all the audio art that I know and treasure and contributed to
GODDAMN JKR IP IN THIS DAY AND AGE fuck all the way off
Framing this as perpetual ownership of Jimin and Jungkook is so insulting to everyone involved
@ao3org taking a few hours to conduct maintenance is not a business opportunity to sell half baked apps to a community you don't understand.
Is this really what blazing is for on tumblr today?
This person has no understanding of fandom culture, oh my god. Fandom runs on the gift economy, on the sharing of our passion and artistic work. There is a reason why fandom rejects the very idea of AI-based fanworks, and the fact that some people don’t understand that and think they can make money of us and the work we create and share is laughable.
Fandom is not a monolith. I'm not an outsider, and you will find many varied opinions on many things. Gift economy is a notable part of it, but far from the only part of it. Regardless this does not take away from giving. Fandom does not reject AI as a whole, it is a segment that does. And, I have full will of being the best developer I can be. I'm gonna do my best to meet the needs of the community who chooses to use LyricWinter.
Using LyricWinter is incredibly affordable. It's 18 minutes of audio per dollar give or take.
Speech synthesis is not free to run. It costs money. A miniscule amount compared to the alternative. As do I. As do the team members I want to hire in order to create high fidelity audio experiences unlike anything available right now.
I love building this but I'm not going to go hungry for the sake of it. I do however provide plenty of free features cause I too used to be someone w/o a bank account.
"Fandom is not a monolith", and yet we're ALL supposed to be okay with our works being fed into your theft machine? Where's the opt-out option to bar your app from accessing our works? Better yet, where's the opt in? The default assumption your app should be making is "writers have not given permission for an audio version of this work to be generated." The (very, very few) writers who are okay with their work being fed through your AI nonsense can opt in. Leave the rest of us out of it.
You mentioned in one of your comments that people should have permission to share audio versions of stories, so put your money where your mouth is.
Never let someone else take Jimin & Jungkook away from you.
AO3’s down again.
If there’s a fic you’ve been meaning to get to, LyricWinter lets you convert it to multi-character audio and download it in advance.
No Wi-Fi? Still works.
AO3 down? Still works.
Your favorites, their voices, offline.
The absolute audacity of this chucklefuck to say "people should get permission from the author if sharing an audio version of their story" while hawking a shitty AI app that CANNOT and WILL NOT get permission from writers.
Pal. Podficcers DO get permission from writers before creating or sharing audio versions of their stories. Deleting comments from people who point that out doesn't change that fact. You're a fucking hypocrite trying to profit off of stolen fanworks, and I hope you have the day you deserve.
The only comment I deleted was my own cause I made a typo. Lyricwinter is a tool that enables a new medium of audio.
It's on the users to use it responsibly, and I will do my part too.
The site is only done when I stop working on it, and as long as I continue to see many people happily using it day after day, I intend to continue development and improve it. I'm one person and until I can hire a team, development will be as fast as I have capacity. It's been 10 months of development and I don't even have a mobile app yet.
And if it's a feature lyricwinter users want, when I have time and hopefully a team, I'll make it easy to get notified if someone is publicly sharing an audio version of your work.
At present, all usage is private until someone shares a .wav file with someone else.
If you're not deleting comments, explain the fact that there are 11 comments on the post, but only 4 visible. I watched my own comment disappear seconds after posting it. That had to happen for a reason.
You have an "ethics" page on your website that claims to care about the creators it's stealing from and promises some type of compensation sometime in the future. If you genuinely cared, you wouldn't a) make it stupidly easy to misuse, or b) advertise the fact that users can steal other people's voices without permission.
You said "People should get permission from the author if sharing an audio version of the story" in response to... god knows what, since you're deleting comments. But you're advertising an app that does precisely the opposite, so you're a hypocrite regardless of whether you were referring to podficcers or not.
Get out of fandom spaces with your profit-seeking, tech bro bullshit. This is a gift economy, and the fact that you're selling an app that makes unauthorized voice clones to generate unauthorized audiobooks/podfics is completely contrary to everything this community stands for.
Never let someone else take Jimin & Jungkook away from you.
AO3’s down again.
If there’s a fic you’ve been meaning to get to, LyricWinter lets you convert it to multi-character audio and download it in advance.
No Wi-Fi? Still works.
AO3 down? Still works.
Your favorites, their voices, offline.
The absolute audacity of this chucklefuck to say "people should get permission from the author if sharing an audio version of their story" while hawking a shitty AI app that CANNOT and WILL NOT get permission from writers.
Pal. Podficcers DO get permission from writers before creating or sharing audio versions of their stories. Deleting comments from people who point that out doesn't change that fact. You're a fucking hypocrite trying to profit off of stolen fanworks, and I hope you have the day you deserve.
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.
As was mentioned in the comments, @cliffweitzman and his sockpuppet accounts' insistence that this is about "accessibility" is further undermined by the fact that he stole works that have existing podfics. Among them, my 450k word fic, A Tale of Ice and Smoke, which I spent nearly two years recording and editing into a 50 hour long, human-read podfic. I was at work when I first heard about his website, so I didn't spend a lot of time digging, but a quick search of my AO3 username on his site brought up my work. Which is already 1) as screenreader-friendly as humanly possible on the sites where the text is posted, 2) podficced by me, a real person using her real voice, 3) available as a podfic on 3+ hosting services for convenience and in case of site outages (archive.org going down for a few weeks this fall prompted me to add another hosting service and check the links on ALL 80 chapters of that podfic). And I wish I'd had more time to investigate further after sending my own takedown request, because while it appeared that the rest of the fics I've written were spared, the same cannot be said for other works where I specifically approached the author for permission and podficced their works. At least one work by another author that I've personally podficced was on Cliff's trash heap of a theft site, along with an AI-mangled version of the author's summary, and if the site hadn't gone offline shortly afterward, I would have alerted every author I've podficced for about their stolen works.
Let me reiterate that again, Cliff. You don't know the first thing about the community you're stealing from. Podfic is not "extremely rare" - you stole at least two and probably more works that I personally podficced. And I'm not the most prolific podficcer or spending my time in the most popular corners of fandom. I guarantee that a large number of the works that you stole to "make them accessible" were already podficced by real people. And even if they weren't, readers and writers have had access to ethical accessibility tools like screenreaders long before you came along.
Wishing you many visits from Disney's lawyers over the blatant use of their characters in your AI slop "cover art" that's still up on your site!
A very-basic crash course in adding covers and metadata to MP3 files
Step 1: Have Mp3tag installed and open on your computer
Step 2: Go to File -> Change Directory
Step 3: Navigate to the file where your MP3s are located and click Select Folder (don't go into the folder - Mp3tag loads the contents of the whole folder for editing, so you need to select the folder itself, not the MP3s inside the folder)
Step 4: Select the file(s) that you want to edit from the list on the right
Step 5: Enter any metadata that you want to apply to those files in the fields on the left (if you're selecting multiple files, don't edit any fields that you don't want applied to ALL the selected files)
Step 6: Add a cover by right-clicking the album icon at the bottom left and selecting Add cover
Step 7: Navigate to the file where your cover image is located, select the image, and click Open
Step 8: Click the save icon in the upper left corner
Rinse and repeat for any and all MP3s you have hiding in the corners of your computer! And if you want to know what any of these other buttons do... don't ask me, because I don't know 😄
Hey I don’t know if this is being talked about on Tumblr but thankfully the AO3 subreddit has a conversation going about this app that just went live.
TikTok user unravel.me.now has just launch an app (lore.fm) she is calling “Audible for AO3”. It’s an app that uses AI voices to read out fics.
🚨She is requiring any authors who do not want their fics to be on this app to OPT OUT by emailing [email protected] 🚨 🚨She has not given an actual template or how you’re supposed to prove you’re the author or said how her team will process this or how she will keep these requests secure🚨
I do not have this app. I haven’t seen anyone use it yet. According to Reddit users, unravel.me.now’s earlier TikToks stated she envisions the app being able to create libraries stored on that app and to have version of “Spotify wrapped”. That implies that eventually data collection must happen, if it’s not happening currently.
I don’t know the actual capabilities of this app. I don’t know the legalities. I do know that it personally feels like this app is trying to turn AO3 into a content generation source and I haven’t heard of the app allowing you to leave a comment or kudos or interact with the original work.
I've seen this on tiktok and tbh I don't know what everyone is freaking out about? It's just to make the fanfic like an audiobook lol. She made it as an accessibility thing so people can listen to fics. I signed up as a beta tester to check it out, and there doesn't seem to be anything malicious. It's also not some AI scraping tool it just generates a voice to read the fic itself.
Not everything new is something scary and weird lol you guys need to calm down sometimes. and if you don't want your fics being idk read by a computers voice just opt out of it, but people are going to do it anyways with any other kind of screenreader? this is just an app that is specifically for fanfics so it's being marketed as one.
Just because you would personally have no real use for it, doesn't mean it's not something that just shouldn't exist. If it's not for you, that's totally fine, but a lot of other people are really excited about it for reasons that are conspicuously left out of this post like accessibility. (and personally I'd love to listen to my own written fics like an audio book as rereading just seems like it'd be too much work and time I don't have.)
Screenreaders are different than ai-generated audiobooks and function differently. Screenreaders also already exist in multiple forms.
Unlike screenreaders, it takes the user away from AO3 and thus treats AO3 like a content generation source instead of a community. There is no way for the users to comment/kudos/bookmark/or even give hits.
It stores the audiofile on both the users device and lore.fm's servers.
Upon closer reading of their TOS it seems there actually isn't a way for authors to even opt out without opening a whole legal can of worms. The app's legal team does not consider fanworks to fall under DMCA, and if there is a story that does (for example original fiction) they require you send in your Full Legal Name, Phone Number, and email address PLUS you have to prove your story is actually on the app and give them the exact location. Which under their current setup they display in the app store isn't actually possible. So you cannot send a DMCA under their TOS.
This isn't an AI generated audio maker though, it genuinely is just a fancy screen reader. The creator of the tool already said that too on her tiktok because people are just spreading misinformation about the app.
And yeah I suppose you could say it's bad that it stores the fics, but it would have to in order to function anyways. And as far as I'm aware this isn't some big company taking it, its a few people who are also in fandom themselves.
That’s not correct but I don’t blame you for not knowing. These people have done a lot of work to hide their actual backgrounds and make this look organic and well intentioned. Their parent company already makes an AI Storytelling app and an AI audiobook app that uses nearly an identical layout. More info in my post here.
It makes me so mad because I desperately want more TTS tools and things that can help make work accessible to more readers, but this is just unethical and screams of tech bros looking to make a cash grab on fandoms.
Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your
Oh well thats really uncool of them to lie about it I thought it was a cool screenreading thing for fanfiction because they said that on their tiktok :(
Yeah, that actually made me more mad than the initial concept. I went from mildly annoyed to infuriated pretty fast. Then, she started deleting comments where people were asking about opt-in vs. opt-out and the storage and use of the data. After that she made the video where she said there were ableist and classist comments (they were literally just questions).
The whole thing is horrible and cynical. It’s frustrating when people take the desperate need we have for these tools and manipulate it for their own gain.
The app has been taken down from both app stores! The whole thing is deeply shitty, and I absolutely don't trust the app creators not to come back with the same thing under a different name, but this moment, lore.fm is gone.
When a comment hits your inbox, it arrives without knowing your current frame of mind or stress level. It doesn't know whether you're having a crisis of confidence or the best day ever. The comment doesn't know your history, your insecurities, your preferences, or your personal stances on a wide range of issues.
More importantly: neither does the person who left that comment.
What prompts someone to leave a comment on a fanwork? Most of the time, it's some combination of
enjoyment of the work
anticipation of what might come next
happiness that someone else has a similar interpretation to what they themselves are looking for
camaraderie related to the canon, the fanon, the trope etc.
liking the creator, themselves, and wanting to make that creator happy
While there are certainly people out there who leave hateful or harassing comments, the overwhelming majority of commenters are trying their best to share joy and make someone's day a little better.
So why is it so easy to take a comment that was written in an attempt to make someone happy and instead be annoyed, frustrated, hurt, or otherwise upset?
As I said at the top, the commenter has no way of knowing what kind of day you're having or how you feel about the work they left their comment on. They don't know whether you feel guilt or pressure to post the next chapter. They don't know whether you're desperate to talk to someone about your characters and the story. If you do feel those things, though, it can be far too easy to read more into a comment than is actually there. A neutral statement becomes a demand. A question becomes a harsh critique. One wrong word can take a comment from a compliment to an insult.
In those moments when you start to feel those things, I encourage you to pause and take a breath. Remember that most people who comment on fanworks are not trying to upset you. Look to see if there might be a different way to interpret what they've said. Perhaps the phrasing is awkward or the word choice is odd. Not everyone who leaves comments feels comfortable writing. Not everyone speaks the same language you do to the same level of proficiency.
Look at your interpretation and see if you're actually projecting your insecurity. Is your anger at the comment actually a defense mechanism because something in the comment pushed an emotional button for you? Do you have guilt related to how slowly you're writing? Worry about how your ending will be received? Anxiety around receiving hate for the ship or the character that you're writing about? Fear that your writing isn't any good?
Maybe it's not your own insecurity at all. Perhaps you've just seen other writers who are upset at comments and taken their interpretation on as your own. Negativity is easy to pass on to those around you, and if you have a whole group of people saying, "This is obviously rude!" then you'll have blinders on to any other possible meaning.
It can be difficult to look at a comment that you interpret as mean and try to find a way to read it positively, and I don't blame anyone who doesn't want to put in that effort. I've just found that if I put myself in the other person's shoes and remember that most people are actually trying to be nice instead of mean, I can often find a way of reading something "rude" and realize that it's really not that bad at all.
