ALSO A DADDY LONG LEGS is different in the UK vs USA. I learned that by arguing with some Brits because they said there was a daddy long legs on the wall, i looked and only saw an insect, argued with them all for 45 minutes until we all looked it up and saw that we were both correct.
The usukus au poll on twitter had a tie between cardverse and nationverse so here's something to celebrate the wins!!
Remember, there are many flavors of usukus out there, so don't hesitate to look for flavors or make your own flavor yourself. Others out there will have similar tastes as you, and a meal is best eaten with others! (We keep cooking with this ship, despite them being tasteless af XDD)
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.
Naruto and Sasuke KISSED in their first chapter together.
We see Sasuke’s Sharingan for the first time when he reawakened it because he thought Naruto was going to die.
Sasuke’s body “moves on it’s own” to save Naruto.
Naruto entered Tailed Beast Mode for the first time because he thought Sasuke DIED.
Sasuke’s final thoughts before he “died” were all centered around Naruto which even included their first kiss.
Hurting Sasuke or HECK EVEN MENTIONING Sasuke in a bad light is a surefire way to trigger Naruto.
Naruto and Sasuke were all BLUSHY AND AVOIDING each other’s glances after wave country.
Sasuke’s first thought upon learning that Itachi is back in Konoha is to SAVE NARUTO.
Sasuke just CANNOT KILL NARUTO and it’s not because he can’t based on his skills or on a “whim” as he puts it.
Naruto WOULD RATHER BE AN IDIOT AND A GENIN ALL HIS LIFE if it meant saving Sasuke.
Naruto would REFUSED TO BECOME HOKAGE unless he saved Sasuke.
Naruto never needed anyone to tell him that he should go after Sasuke because NARUTO GOES AFTER SASUKE BECAUSE HE WANTS TO.
Naruto wished for Sasuke on a shooting star.
Naruto literally had a panic attack at the thought of Sasuke dying.
Sasuke called Naruto his “one and only”.
Sasuke could have died at the last battle between Naruto and him but HE LIVED FOR NARUTO.
Naruto is the hopeful heart that connects Sasuke to Konoha. (i.e. the only reason why Sasuke even gives Konoha the time of day)
Every member of the Otsutsuki clan who has seen Naruto and Sasuke together have acknowledged their bond or have worked towards getting Naruto and Sasuke together.
Naruto left Konoha and Ichiraku Ramen to train for three years with Jiraiya to save Sasuke. NARUTO LEFT RAMEN FOR SASUKE.
Naruto and Sasuke are literal soulmates.
UPDATE [June 25, 2020]
Naruto and Sasuke have canonically watched each other since they were children and have felt a kinship with one another long before they became teammates.
SASUKE FED NARUTO EVEN THOUGH THE CONSEQUENCE WAS BEING SENT BACK TO THE ACADEMY which can ultimately set him back on his goal of killing Itachi.
Naruto and Sasuke know each others hearts like no one else in the entire series.
Naruto DOES NOT NEED A GENJUTSU to know that Sasuke is someone who he treasures. HECK! NARUTO EVEN BROADCASTED HIS ENTIRE INNER THOUGHTS ON SASUKE TO ALL THE NINJAS IN THE 4TH SHINOBI WAR VIA INO.
Sasuke only thought of going back to Konoha during his redemption journey because he read a letter from NARUTO and ALL OF NARUTO’S MESSY HANDWRITTING. I’m sobbing!!!
The only time we see Sasuke cry and laugh in happiness as well as feel content was when he was literally BLEEDING OUT TO DEATH besides NARUTO.
NARUTO when faced with the choice of either letting Sasuke kill everyone in Konoha or killing Sasuke CHOSE TO DIE WITH SASUKE. THIS BOY WOULD DIE FOR SASUKE BECAUSE WHO THE HECK CARES ABOUT RETURNING TO KONOHA AND BEING HOKAGE IF HE LOSES SASUKE?!
Naruto is WILLING TO BE BEATEN UP, CRY, AND GROVEL just to save Sasuke’s life. HE IS WILLING TO LOOK WEAK AND PATHETIC IN FRONT OF THE FREAKING RAIKAGE FOR SASUKE.
Itachi himself entrusted Sasuke to Naruto. NARUTO HAS ITACHI’S BLESSING TO BE THE ONE FOR SASUKE.
Sasuke is the only “friend” of Naruto who has ever met Naruto’s mother. SASUKE HAS KUSHINA’S BLESSING TO BE WITH NARUTO.
And that’s just a few that I could think about right now.
But don’t worry I’ll update this list every now and then.
That ending is amazing. Naruto runs away from everyone to find Sasuke, and when Sasuke appears, the sun comes out. Then Naruto smiles and they start walking towards each other to smile and hold hands. The lyrics playing from the moment Sasuke is about to appear onwards? "I’ll name that star on the right after myself / Please call it by its new name / 'Cause your name would be perfect for that star on the left / Then we’d always be standing side by side"
ughh i know. Idk how anyone can miss the romantic undertones.
Everyone is happy and together, surrounded by lanterns, and naruto’s admiring the beauty around him for a second but then runs away
Even with so many people there, he isnt satisfied
He runs for a while and looks exhausted as his surrounding gets darker
then he stops and closes his eyes
And Sasuke appears. Light also fills the scene again. The lyrics of the song that play as Sasuke appears until the end are
“I’ll name that star on the right after myselfPlease call it by its new name‘Cause your name would be perfect for that star on the leftThen we’d always be standing side by side”
And Naruto smiles, opening his eyes, happy
They walk toward each other as their past selves watch
And smile at each other
then proceed to link hands
They are the two stars that always want to be next to each other, even if it’s far from everyone else, they'll shine next to each other
I mentioned earlier Kishimoto using body language used in Japanese theatre, so I gathered some pictures to show what I mean.
I have to mention Naruto’s master Jiraiya, whose design, antics and speech are all based on Kabuki. Jiraiya’s rough, broad and bombastic way of speech and body language is a style used in kabuki for masculine, heroic characters. These type of characters take a lot of space and use flamboyant and exaggerated, even aggressive body language.
I have seen a claim that Naruto is the “opposite of traditionally masculine” because he’s flamboyant while Sasuke is traditionally masculine. Sorry but that’s not what Kishimoto was going for:
He draws Naruto in a similar manner to Jiraiya whenever he wants to bring “Kabuki” into Naruto’s character. Notice the crude facial expressions, the face paint and the same, reoccuring hand move.
Jiraiya and Naruto’s sage mode “makeup” is also a nod to the exaggerated face paint used by these hero characters in Kabuki plays. Which is why it makes perfect sense Naruto is wearing the intimidating “hero makeup” when arriving as a hero to save everyone.
So what about Sasuke? Sasuke’s look is more soft, fluid and not exaggerated (including facial expressions). I don’t bother with too many individual pictures so that this doesn’t become too long but Kishimoto spends time portraying Sasuke as poised and graceful in comparison to Naruto’s brash and exaggerated appearance.
Here as well you can see Naruto’s body language being the same type of brash and exaggerated, taking a lot of space, while Sasuke is calm and beautiful and expressionless. . Sasuke is the yin to Naruto’s yang.
But nowhere is Kishimoto’s intention more evident than in this illustration he drew in 2018. Here they are complete opposites. Sasuke’s stance is graceful and closed, his back is straighter and his shoulders are down. Naruto’s is more assertive and open (arrogant). Sasuke is delicate looking, feminine (has some makeup), his build is slightly smaller than Naruto’s (look at the wrists). Sasuke uses the back of his hand to hold back the sleeve, unlike Naruto. Sasuke’s face is smaller and more slender than Naruto’s while Naruto’s features are squarer and not polished. Even the patterns and colors of the kimonos follow. Sasuke’s blue and white symbolise calmness and passivity, Naruto’s colors and patterns symbolise aggression and war (notice the lighting and thunder clouds). The sheer attention to detail!
I don’t think this illustration is much talked in western spaces (?) but in jpn fandom this was definitely noticed and there was some talk about Sasuke’s “feminine aura” when this was released, and that Kishimoto always draws him so beautiful. The contrast between the two of them is interesting, and in my honest opinion ignoring Sasuke’s traditional beauty and grace, as well as Naruto’s brashness, is missing a part of their characters and their relationship.
it’s obvious to me that Sakura is looking at Sasuke this way because she has feelings for him. She has hopes.
Sakura has romantic feelings for Sasuke and she is giving him this look because she is hoping for something more (though, we know how that ends).
It’s a simple use of body language. Glancing can betray a desire for a certain thing. For example glancing at the door can indicate a desire to leave.
That’s when I took a closer at this scene:
I could tell that Sasuke was giving Naruto the same look which Sakura was giving Sasuke. But, there was more meaning in this glance. Sasuke looks sad when he is looking away. It indicates the regret which he feels for pushing Naruto away.
Then, he takes a glance at Naruto (2nd GIF) which is just like the way in which Sakura looked at Sasuke.
every time i see a ship having a really dramatic, heartfelt moment i’m just like “you’ll never be sasuke and naruto” and that’s my illness, that’s my cross to bear
there isn’t a scene in all of cinema, literature, or even lived experience that can compare to sasuke and naruto slowly bleeding out, having blown off each other’s arms as they remembered each and every moment in their childhood where they long to be close to each other, and just lying there, bitterly trying to antagonize each other, before sasuke asks “why did you do that for me, no matter what i did to you, why did you always chase me?” grappling with his self-hatred and feeling of utterly isolated from the world
and for naruto to answer “you know already, don’t you? because you’re my friend” and then sasuke asks “what is a friend to you”
and naruto to again answer, “it’s not like i really understand it either, just that when i see you take on the world and get all messed up, it kinda… hurts. it hurts so much, i cannot leave it alone”
and they lie again in silence, reflecting on their memories, until naruto asks if they’ve died and gone to heaven
like there is NO romance in the WORLD that could EVER COMPARE TO THAT
sasuke begging naruto to reassure him that he can be good, asking him how he can be so sure he won’t be manipulated into doing harm again
it being so obvious to naruto that sasuke is inherently good that he can only respond with confident disbelief before sasuke turns away in tears
the almost heartshaped smear of blood between them, a ghost of hands that can only touch each other on another plane–that can only be held in the wake of violence
for real your favorite romantic story cannot even touch this shit it can’t it canNOT
Finallyy T_T drew them in this style!!! .. you guys must thanks to the one who commission me this piece << @chieffroggy >> to make it happens. She let me do whatever i want,, like omfg xD So i told her i want to drew them in kimono, a pair with related theme, included in the pattern is contains sun and moon, warm and cold, and their kuchiyose spirit. she agreed.. and tadaaaaa.. hope you guys like it too ^^
list of things that arent talked about enough includes when naruto saw a shooting star and put his hand to his chest closed his eyes and thought about sasuke
