22, fem Discord link ⬇️ You probably know me for my fanfic on Ao3 . (If you’re coming from ffnet…. I only update on Ao3 anymore so best switch) Lately, I’ve been getting fanart for The Sixth Shadow (and some for More Than Enemies) so feel free to use the fic name as hashtag or the thinknicht tag if you want to browse all my fic related posts specifically. Otherwise you’re in danger of getting drowned in the clusterfuck that is my blog)
As spam continues to be a problem on AO3, here's an update on the types of spambot comments you may see, what we're doing to combat them, and how you can help! Read more at https://otw-news.org/mr42w8j9
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.
PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.
AI scraping isn’t ok, but AI fics are? The statement that “there is nothing in our Terms of Service that prohibits fanworks that are fully or partly generated with AI tools from being posted to the AO3, if they otherwise qualify as fanworks” and that “if fans are using AI to generate fanworks, then our current position is that this is also a type of work that is within our mandate to preserve” is despicable. AI fanworks should be banned through the TOS, NOT allowed.
Op shut off reblogs but i genuinely want to share this (photo id underneath cut)
[image one description: screenshot of the original post:
My god my girlies
MY GIRLIES. I am still crying, I am still crying about this. Every day I cry about this.
You bitched so hard about being forced to read 1984 in school when it’s so problematic (tm)
Maybe you should have actually paid attention when you read it
Because all these AI fics
You are LITERALLY MAKING THE GARBAGE NOVELS FROM 1984 that are written by machines
You have literally recreated the worthless soulless machine-made books
Literally,
Literally. Every once in a while it hits me in a fresh wave of disbelief and anger. You have literally created the dystopian book from the dystopian story about why dystopia is bad, and you are passing it around like it’s this amazing thing. I’m crying, I’m crying.
Image two: a screenshot from Nineteen Eighty-Four with a comment underneath
"Julia was twenty-six years old... and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor... She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces."
- From 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four), by George Orwell. Published by Secker & Warburg in 1948.
I sat down and read AI fics so you don't have to...
So I got curious about how difficult it would be to tell apart AI writing compared to regular fics, and I've seen people be concerned about how to distinguish the two. So I read some fics across multiple fandoms, with different lenghts, popularity and ratings.
Here are my main take aways:
Continuity and logic:
AI is terrible at remembering what it has already told you and make it make sense with what's to come. Many examples of X said this in the first paragraph, and then further down the line it was suddenly Y who said or did the thing. The longer the story gets or the more characters it contains the worse this problem becomes.
Physical placement:
Suddenly people are in a different room, not as close to the thing or closer to each other than previously described. Are they holding a cup or not? Where the heck did their hands suddenly go? who knows. The robot has glowing eyes when everyone in the fandom knows it ain't the eyes that glow on robots in this fandom🙃
The mood:
Wtf on this one. The moods are so strange and there is a severe case of telling instead of showing. I've read some that were clearly prompted to give a certain mood which meant that it was mentioned at times that just didn't fit. Like "there was tension in the air between them" when absolute zero things have happened to create this tension. Or quick shift from comfortable -> tense -> comfortable in one paragraph. Yikes.
Generalizations:
AI uses whatever it can find to fill in the gaps. Example: if you're writing about someone in a certain profession it will just grab whatever it might have picked up about said profession and fill in wherever it can. So you end up with strange descriptions that might fit a stereotypical person from that career, but certainly not this particular character. Makes for some real out of character descriptions.
Conversation:
The individual lines might make sense, but the overall conversation doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. Or the things they say are so vague and unspecific that it's meaningless. Think "I'm 13 and this is deep" kinda things. I also saw plenty of cases of a child/teen/college student would not talk like that.
Word choice:
You know how some authors use different words than what you might expect, but it just works? Gives a funny, quirky or heartfelt vibe? AI does basicly the opposite. The word choice in many of these fics made me stop and reread multiple paragraphs because it really didn't suit the setting. You would think it would be easy to make it pick the right choice between formal and informal language, but if it also needs to fullfill other criteria simultaneously it gets messy. If it's a subject that is usually talked about in a formal tone, but in this case shouldn't be... the poor thing can get confused.
Repetition:
This one surprised me, but I'm pretty sure it happens from poor prompting that doesn't have enough info to go on. So damn many repetitions of the same word or almost same phrase popped up in many of them. I know we're already telling nothing with these stories, but come on how many times to we hear about the lamp on the shelf?
Pacing:
Either too fast and skipping parts in a way that doesn't make sense (see above logic problems) or sloooow where it really shouldn't be (see above repetition issues). Makes for an overall either confusing or very boring reading experience depending on which direction it went in.
-
To avoid all of these mistakes, you have to be a somewhat decent writer to start with. So if you think "I'm a bad writer AI will be able to fix it for me" - Yeah, no. It can help with grammar, but it cannot write a compelling story as it is now.
The worst part was that some of these stories were based on ideas that I would like to read about. But the AI execution completely killed the story.
Allows you to choose the origin of where you want the name to be from, whether you want a more feminine vs masculine vs androgenous name (as voted by users), random surname generator, and clicking on the name gives you important info like if there are any famous people with the same name, where it’s from, how common it is, and how people tend to see it, etc.
You can also search their name database by letter or meaning or origin, so if you know you want a character who has a name/surname that starts with an A from Ireland, there’s a whole list for you to choose from.
Census sites
Especially useful if you’re looking for a name from a specific place and/or time period. Just search “(country) census (year)” and you’ll find a database of real people who lived in that place at that time. No one can ever call your names unrealistic again.
For coming up with place names:
Fantasy name generator
This site can basically come up with any name for any person, place, or thing you might ever need. There are also specific generators for different fandoms if you’re looking to make an OC in an established world.
For finding that one word on the tip of your tongue:
One Look Thesaurus
This is my go-to. Not only can you find synonyms like a regular thesaurus, but you can also describe words like “unhappy smile” or “quiet laugh” to find the more specific word you’re looking for.
WordHippo
Works as a thesaurus (very similar to One Look) but also includes search options for words that rhyme, words that contain a specific letter or are a specific length, different word forms, sentences with a specific word etc. etc. It's like Thesaurus++
For coming up with ideas:
Word cloud
When I need to inspire a new idea, I write down all the things I’m interested in (hauntings, academia, lesbians, etc.) and put them into a word cloud to shuffle them next to each other. Sometimes seeing a concept in a new context can spark new ideas!
WWF Discord
This is my discord channel (shameless plug) for when you need to brainstorm off other people but don’t have anyone irl to talk to. We’re also happy to read and give feedback on writing, answer writing questions, or just chat!
For visualizing places and characters:
Pinterest
Pinterest can at times be a bit too sterile for my tastes, but if you use the right words, you can find more realistic photos of places. For example, adding “aesthetic” after basically any word will bring up a more broad collection of photos to help you flesh out places.
This is also a great way to find photos of people and fashion to help visualize characters. I’m bad at describing clothes, so I usually collect photos of outfits to help me know what my characters are wearing. Searching up “character inspiration” will collect more interesting photos and drawings of people who might not exactly be of our world.
(However, to make Pinterest not show you AI results, you have to go into your settings and check the “reduce AI” box. Luckily, it does mostly work.)
Death to Stock
Like pinterest but completely AI free (hooray!) Only drawback is that you have to pay a monthly subscription (about $20 CAD).
Cosmos
Very similar to pinterest but slightly more "artsy". I'm not super familiar with this one but I believe all the photos are human and you can save them and create collections with a free account.
Dupe Photos
Royalty-free stock image site with very Pinterest-core photos!
Minecraft
If you haven’t built your entire fictional city in Minecraft instead of writing, why not? It’s fun.
The Sims
This one is dual purpose because you can not only create your characters in Create a Sim, but you can design their houses. If you really want to go for it, you can bulldoze all the lots in your town and build your world from scratch.
Hero Forge
This character creator is intended for making D&D minis, so it has more fantasy-like options over the Sims if your characters are a bit out of this world.
House Plans.com
I was introduced to this resource through the comments on this post and it has quickly become one of my favourite things to use. If you struggle with the layout of buildings, this site lets you choose beds/baths/sq ft etc. and will show you house plans created by designers that most closely match your specs. You can also search by style instead if you're more interested in the aesthetics.
For checking grammar:
Grammar Girl
Easy to follow definitions and examples, and if you learn better by listening, every article comes with a podcast to follow along with instead.
Grammar Monster
This one is my favourite for checking grammar rules because there’s tons of examples in graphics that helps for any situation.
Reedsy
Among other things, reedsy can connect you to professional editors within your budget.
For writing advice:
One Stop for Writers
This one was recommended from my discord channel and has all sorts of tutorials and resources for the writing craft.
My Blog Directory
Another shameless plug, but if you need writing advice on something specific, you can search through my directory to see if it’s there. If it isn’t, you can always send me an ask about it!
For an alternative to Google Docs:
Ellipsus
Think google docs but without AI. Yay!
Scrivener
A more comprehensive writing software created specifically for writers, however there is a one-time payment to use ($80 CAD).
(will update this list with any more suggestions or resources I discover 😊 Thanks to everyone for your recs!)
PSA for people who might not know: @glimmerfics is a site that uses AI to produce choose-your-own-adventure fics. an author on the site writes a little bit, and then AI slop fills in the rest. a reader gets some free ‘turns’, and then they have to pay for more. Glimmer profits both off of fanfiction and AI slop.
Glimmer claims to partially ‘offset’ the environmental harm through purchasing carbon offsets. they claim to care about artistry and cite sharing the concern of AI in fandom, but immediately throw it away with some bullshit excuse about only using AI as a ‘tool’, because they ‘don't believe machines can replace human creativity’. they also claim that their goal of butchering man-made art via injecting randomized AI slop into it is because they ‘want to live in a world where more people are making art, not fewer’. sinisterly hollow sentiments, all of it.
i am sick of AI-shills co-opting accessibility arguments to justify causing harm. art is HUMAN MADE. across ages, across abilities, across every single human variable, art can and does persist. this language spits in the face of every disabled artist. every poor person creating in the spaces between. every marginalized person crafting art under oppression. AI does not make art accessible, because it does not make art period.
AI is not a tool, it is a miserable disaster and a despicable weapon. it wreaks havoc on local communities where data centers are built. people dying at rapid rates from cancers and other preventable illnesses directly related to air, water, and land pollution. it is forcing states to go into droughts from stealing all the fresh, drinkable water. it is kicking people out of their careers and preying on vulnerable populations to work for them. it is stealing and scraping people's work, and stealing people's REAL art, including other fanfic authors who do not consent. it is also wildly inaccurate. it also sends people into psychosis and causes them to end their lives.
sites like Glimmer normalize all of that violence, and how they try to wrap it in a velvet bow further normalizes, erases, and justifies it. as an artist who sits at the intersection of many of the identities these AI-proponents claim to be helping, I am appalled. i know many others are too. it's imperative we call out leeches like these in creative spaces.
i don't give a fuck if Glimmer responds and says whatever PR statement they think will be ‘transparent’ and help weasel their way out of real accountability. i don’t care if they say every bit of money goes back into developing the site: any site that uses generative AI in fandom spaces should not exist. especially not with charging users money in direct exchange for fanfiction. it puts the entire fandom community at risk. it mocks and endangers what they insist they care about.
i don't care what reasoning, anecdotes, placation, loopholes, dismissals, or logical fallacies they may employ to rationalize their platform in their potential response to this post. the entire foundation of their business is actively causing harm to the world and the community they claim to love. unless they stop using generative AI entirely (and stop monetizing fanfiction), whatever they say is hollow. these people know they can get away with it, they have users who either don't know the damage AI causes or don't care, and have people singing the praises of the platform. a lot of people applaud bad things. it doesn't make them any less bad.
there are valid ways to create ACTUAL choose your own adventure fics that do not perpetuate violence and oppression (like Twine!). Glimmer can dig their heads in the sand and pretend they're paving a path all they want, but it's a path to hell.
FUCK AI and fuck opportunists. please repost to spread the word, because i've even run across some of these 'fics' and their posts in the wild and been swindled.
“I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay - cold, expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike construed by the world into the attempt to hook a husband. Never mind! well-meaning women have their own consciences to comfort them after all. Do not, therefore, be too much afraid of showing yourself as you are, affectionate and good-heartened; do not too harshly repress sentiments and feelings excellent in themselves, because you fear that some puppy may fancy that you are letting them come out to fascinate him; do not condemn yourself to live only by halves, because if you showed too much animation some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you designed to dedicate your life to his inanity.”
— Charlotte Brontë writing to a friend who had been kind to a man she thought was married, only to have him fall in love with her because he thought she was flirting (letter dated April 2, 1845).
My favouritest sport fact ever is that in 1990s 2 cardiac surgeons watched an f1 race to save the lives of countless kids. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) kept losing the lives of patients after successful heart surgeries. Specifically the 10-15 minutes after a bonefide clinically successful surgery patients would die:
And so the two surgeons filmed a handover after heart surgery and sent it to the Ferrari pitcrew who were told to critique and improve handover process
And from this:
we got this:
The error rate during patien handovers dropped from 30% to 10% with the F1 informed protocol.
I literally love this fact so much because being an pitcrew member is such a thankless job because theyre underpaid and overworked mechanics and they literally saved lives in this instance.
Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital turned to Formula 1 for answers. By studying Ferrari’s pit-stop teamwork, they redesigned how patien
I love this!
And it that it wasn't a one and done.
The doctors went to the race tracks to watch the car changes and the pit crews went to the hospitals and watched a live transfer and offered suggestions and they kept working with them to improve.
After there was a successful improvement of the most vital metrics of a handover of a patient from surgery to ICU, the pit crews also worked with other hospitals for other procedures and it's now a whole thing of trying to apply the specialized, streamlined and speedy teamwork and nonverbal coordination of pit crews to other high-risk fields.
This is a perfect example of how two very different fields of knowledge meeting can make a huge leap forward in progress.
fanfiction is a rare gem and a solid, living proof that, in a world of tiktok, influencers and content posting, not everything is about money and going viral. art can still be art just for the sake of the artists’ pure love, joy and passion for the art they create. fanfic writers write 100k words and more about the characters they love for free. just because they love these characters and the art of writing so much. art is not dead and the world is still beautiful.
Look, it's simple. If a person has to actively work to make money, they're not "the rich" and they're not the problem. A surgeon making $200k a year still stops making money if they stop showing up to do surgery, because they're still selling their labor. The radical discrepancies in how we value different skills are certainly a problem, but the guy who makes money when he doesn't even get out of bed is the one making money on the value of other people's labor.
things some people, especially people who are new to ao3 or fandom/fanfic space as a whole, seem to not understand:
archive of our own is an archive. not a social media.
archive of our own was built with the stance that there would be no censorship, because other platforms already had censorship where some things that were taboo were reported/removed. ao3 was built with the purpose that all of these works, that were not allowed on other platforms, would be allowed on ao3.
the archive will house anything that’s considered fanworks. so no, you cannot report this fic because it portrays in explicit details taboo topics about xyz, you cannot report that fic because it romanticizes and glorifies xyz. ao3 will not remove any of those fics, because whether or not you like it, those fics do not go against ao3’s terms of service.
“but these things are not allowed on other platforms” that’s precisely why ao3 was created, to house and give a platform to these things that were censored/banned/removed from other platforms.
if you have a problem with this, you can use other platforms to post and read fanfics
but you should also know that ao3 by far has the best tagging system, meaning you won’t get anything like what ao3 provides on other platforms, meaning it may be a pain in the ass for you to find a fic with the prompts and pairing you’re looking for, meaning you may still get jump scared by things that are triggering to you half way through your reading of what you thought was an innocent fic. because other platforms don’t have tagging systems, where you can find and avoid any character/pairing/tag as you please, like ao3.
snowghoul
titsay
yousharknotpass
germansingergirl
discoholicmusic
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
kaledo-art
