I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.
IN SHORT
Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.
When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media postsâusingÂ
his dyslexia;Â
his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; andÂ
a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a âvalidâ claim,
as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.
When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his âapologiesâ as well as his website (allegedlyâitâs possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasnât any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there.Â
THE TAKEAWAYS
1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain;Â
2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, andÂ
3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but theyâre NOT DELETED from Weitzmanâs servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again.Â
THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)
Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):
This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)
I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entiretyâthough, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywallâalong with a link promising to take meâthrough an app downloadable on the Apple Storeâto an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:
Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) werenât working, I put âKara Danversâ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.
I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the coversâas well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratingsâmade it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice.Â
I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and Iâve only ever had to deal with art theftâwhich has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was repostedâand I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.
After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work theyâve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobookâ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if theyâd heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.
While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knightâs methods and decided to contact OTWâs legal department:
And then I went to bed.
By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:
@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.
That response came only an hour or so later:Â
Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointingâI doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasnât eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.
I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.
A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)
A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.
Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious pricesâthough in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for freeâmy dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.
Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3âand, as a result, my original tumblr postâbegan taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :
Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didnât screenshot in time so Iâm sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):
which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit userâs screenshot, I didnât see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)
... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)
After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether.Â
Itâs not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume itâs the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, youâre not missing much:
And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.
That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:
They were completed works;
They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and
They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.
If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!
I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.
I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.
Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back upâbut the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***
Thatâs when several usersâthe ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that wayâreported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.
Soooâ
Weâre obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they arenât actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasnât willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them.Â
This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:
Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg youâseriously, Iâm on my knees hereâto not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones youâve kept in your âmarked for laterâ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and itâs our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.
Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.
THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):
*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, itâs pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you donât steal some other kidâs art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didnât want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so itâs clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that.Â
**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: itâs even greasier than it looks at first glance. Itâs not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover âartâ, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that canât be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had âfound familyâ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, âenemies to friends to loversâ and âlove triangleâ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrapeânot only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzmanâs needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation.Â
***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but Iâm hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-streamâs search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, donât have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.
Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.
i will ALWAYS go up to bat for the academic necessity of KYM. memes have become such an important cultural language in the past decade and losing the origins of these neo-idioms would be such a tremendous and needless loss.
The (unionized) German amazon workers have said they are joining the picket line in solidarity with their US counterparts.
The union has been fighting for good faith negotiations and a fair contract for over a year. Amazon skipped the December 15th deadline to come to the table.
Remember, the striking workers are not the reason your orders are delayed.
a lot of behaviors that get attributed to "female socialization" can be so much more easily and accurately understood as a person recognizing the power differential surrounding them and behaving sensibly in response to that.
like. does a woman politely listen to a man monologue at her because of some experience she had when she was twelve that magically cursed her to behave that way forever, or does she do it because the man has the power to hurt her and she knows it?
does a woman do all the dishes in her household because she is less capable of breaking out of a long-ago conditioned response than, like, your average trained dog, or is she doing that because she knows that all the men in the house will blame her if she doesnt and will make life worse for her if she speaks up?
maybe a lot of sexist patterns of behavior that are widely observed in society arent caused by women like, lacking willpower or backbone? maybe it is super fucking weird for supposedly feminist movements to imply this is the case when they talk about female socialization as the end all, be all of predicting human behavior?
isnt it both more useful and more respectful toward women to consider that they are perceiving their present circumstances accurately, and recognize when power is already being wielded against them, and take logical measures to deescalate and protect themselves because it works? is it not fucking clear to everybody that trans women in particular have to do this all the fucking time?
Iâm not sure how many people realize that thereâs a way in which hurt/comfort is actually very kinky, because at its core youâve got this emotional power exchange fantasy where one character is vulnerable and helpless and the other takes care of them. In the case of stories involving grievous injuries, where someone is bedridden for a long time, you often end up with two characters in a 24/7 total power exchange relationship without a safeword. It just doesnât involve as many whips and dog collars.
I donât actually care if someone thinks this is derailing because itâs important.
This applies to all genders on both sides. Teen boys often get left out of these posts, but they are also preyed upon like this, by men and women and also people who are neither because no one is incapable of being a predator. This post shouldnât be gendered. You can say it happens to girls more, and it could be true. But it happens to boys and they are less likely to talk about it when they get hurt. Less likely to get support if they do, especially if the older person was a woman. I donât think we have an accurate statistic on how often it happens to boys because of this.
But regardless. Donât you think they should be told how to stay safe too?
One of my coworkers told me about a good friend of his, a guy that âhad a thingâ with an older woman in her mid-twenties that started when he was about fifteen. He talked about how their friend group thought it was cool, how they were a little jealous of him. She was pretty and interested, which is any fifteen year old boyâs dream.
The older they got, though, the weirder it got. She got pregnant by this kid when he was still seventeen. Thankfully he went to the authorities and got custody of the baby when he was an adult, but my coworker kind of laughed it off as kids being stupid. I think he thought I would just dismiss it, which is heartbreaking.
I asked him if it would have been okay if it was a fifteen year old female friend and a twenty five year old guy. He immediately replied that it would NOT have been okay, he and his friends would have beaten the guy up.
The dissonance is real, guys. Thereâs a kid who was groomed at fifteen and a single dad at nineteen because his friends and family only gave this message to girls. This message matters to everyone- no matter your gender, no matter the gender of the other person- if you are a child and an adult is âinterestedâ in you, RUN AWAY. They donât have your best interests at heart, and thatâs not love at all.
Now what would happen if a homeless quilt was made by someone who actually cared about homeless people?
Meet former ad designer Willie Baronet.Â
Baronet is an artist who talks to homeless people and buys their signs from them for $20 a pop, if theyâre willing to sell. He uses the signs in art exhibits to educate the privileged and point them to ways they can help, and to humanize homeless people and tell them they matter.Â
One sign at a time, Baronet makes a statement to help people with $20 in their hand and a voice that rings across the nation saying âIâm here.â
(source)
So not only did they take the small, hand-made signs away from homeless people but instead of just tossing them, they kept them. Not only did they keep them as some kind of homeless trophy, they actually went through the time, energy, and effort (funded by tax dollars) to tape them together, pose for a picture, and post it during the holiday season.Â
This is why people say that there are no good cops. Because there arenât.Â
Scientists launched reptiles into the nursery to assess the reaction of the kids. The result killed: the crumbs perceived the reptiles as toys, and some tried to eat them
I find this interesting, it really counters the unfounded but popular notion that fear of certain animals is evolutionary and intrinsic within our DNA.
You know what since Iâve got a ton of new followers because my post on puberty blockers took off and people apparently want to see me rant, Iâm gonna get up on my soapbox for a PSA for tumblrâs aging userbase.
Do not! Get! A Medicare Advantage plan!
Tell your parents not to get one. Tell your aunts and uncles not to get one. Tell your friends not to get one.
Why is that, you might say? Kouri, what is a Medicare Advantage plan, you might say?
tl;dr Medicare is the government healthcare plan for Americans of a certain age or with certain disabilities. It is owned, administered, and operated by the government. You are entitled, if you wish, to outsource your Medicare and have your policy run by a commercial group, such as United HealthCare, Cigna, Aetna, et cetera.
Hereâs how it works: For everyone who signs up for, say, a plan that rhymes with Figna Medicare Advantage, Medicare gives Figna a certain amount of money and says âuse this to take care of this patientâ.
You can see where this is going, right? Figna says âsure boss! *wink nudge*â and then shoves as much of that money into their own pockets as possible, and they do that by finding excuses to NOT pay for your medical care.
Medicare Advantage plans are pushed and marketed heavily. Theyâll call you. Theyâll set up stands in your PCP office to try to encourage you to buy in. They will say things like âwith Medicare, you have to pay a 20% coinsurance, but with us you only have a 10% coinsuranceâ and completely neglect to tell you that having a smaller coinsurance only matters if they approve the fucking care that you need, which often they wonât (while Medicare would have) and if your doctors are willing to accept it, which often they donât (while they do accept Medicare).
Is Medicare perfect? Absolutely not! I've got my share of bones to pick with them. But simply put:
Medicare is government administered. It is a service. It costs the government money, which is why the GOP is always trying to cut funding to it. Medicare Advantage is corporately administered. It is supposed to make money. Which gives them incentives to deny your care and fuck you over that Medicare simply does not have.