hey guess what is todayâs addition to my ever-growing list of reasons to never share another multichapter work online again!
if youâre a fanfic author, you may want to do a search for a line from your fic and see what comes up. someone calling themselves LoveRosieSunshine changed the names of 1. my fic, 2. the chapters and 3. the characters and nothing else & then uploaded it to Wattpad without my permission.
if you enjoyed You & Me & Holiday Wine (the original of which is published only on ao3 here), please do me a favor and report the plagiarism to Wattpad. more screenshots & the link to their âversionâ of my fic (itâs literally a copy/paste) are under the cut, along with directions on how to report even if you donât have an account. if you do have an account, iâd appreciate it a lot if you could leave them and/or their readers a comment about the fact that this is the exact kind of bullshit that stops authors from sharing the stories these readers profess to love so much.
iâd be grateful if you guys could share this post with fandom friends, as well. iâm sure this person has never actually written a single story in their life, so if you have f/f work on ao3 youâll want to check if yours wasnât stolen, too.
Jennie Kim hates the winter holiday until her bestfriend 'forced' Jennie to come to her cabin in the mountains where she's promptly held hos
i know iâm asking a lot, but Wattpad will only allow me to file a DMCAâwhich requires me to share my full legal name and address with Wattpad as well as the plagiarist, which iâm obviously not comfortable doing. for fuckâs sake.
if you ever see any of my work on Wattpad, that is theft. i will never share my work there, and i would appreciate you letting me know if you find it reposted. apparently this one has been up for at least a year and i donât know what makes me want to throw my laptop harder, the comments saying âthatâs SO [character iâve never heard of]!â or the people recognizing it as a supercorp fic and then carrying on as if thatâs perfectly fine.
THANK YOU ALL! and thanks @gveret-fic & @saunteringvaguelydownwards for pointing out the story is currently down. i have no idea whether the thief (temporarily) took it offline themselves or if it was removed in response to reports, but the plagiarist profile is still online (and now listing â26 works, 25 publishedâ so iâm keeping an eye out and not turning off reblogs just yet.
Iâve gone through every single one of their works and found original sources for all but two, simply by pasting a sentence without character names into a search engine. and because i thrive on pettiness, iâve gone ahead and reported them all. if you have some time to kill, i encourage you to do the same! mind that this is obviously a wattpad-wide problem: iâm seeing supercorp treated by whatever fandom âpinkblackâ is as their own fun little sandbox to shit in, but there are traditionally published works up too. remember that this hurts small & indie authors, especially those who use kindle unlimited because Amazon contractually obligates their work to be Amazon exclusive!
authors, please do a search for sentences from your works to check whether your work hasnât been mangled like this too. i have a wattpad account now, so iâm here for you if you need my support!
thank you @amjustanobserver for putting a list together with links back to the original versions of the works LoveRosieSunshine has stolen!
i just replied to someone in the comments, but i figured Iâd share it more broadly, too: though all but a couple of the stories on LoveRosieSunshineâs account have been made inaccessible, they havenât actually been deletedâthe plagiaristâs listed story count is still 26 like before.
this person is 100% going to upload these files again at some point, which appears to be Wattpad âauthorsââs favorite pastime.
Wattpad in general, and f/f works in particular seem to have an absurdly high prevalence of plagiarism. itâs celebrated there, âauthorsâ and their followers happily welcoming back formerly banned accounts and eagerly awaiting the next stolen installment. if you can stomach it, the screenshots are under the cut.
just a cursory glance at the other works in the blackpink fandom showed me works that have been stolen from @i-am-robie (don't go slow 'cause you're gonna be someone, plagiarized here), @seabiscuits-us (A Foolish Wit, plagiarized here), @mooosicaldreamz (and when i'm feeling alone, you remind me of home, plagiarized here) and @hrwinter (Mrs. & Mrs. Danvers, plagiarized here).
iâve filed complaints about all of these works, but Wattpadâs official take is âoh oops we can see with our own eyes that the content infringes copyright but weâll only take action when works are on Amazon because unless thereâs a financial liability to our platform weâre really not investedâ, so i have very little hope they will feel compelled to do the right thing by just my report alone.
Also From Microsoftâs own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. đ¤Ą
Because this has mostly been talked about with Windows 11, heads-up that this installed itself on every Windows 10 computer in our house with this week's update.
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.
There are AI ...Filters? Translators? That change the original text into different writing styles. Ex: None (Original text). Simplify (no complex sentence structures or words) and Gen-Z. It is called "AI Transform"
Pride and Prejudiced by Jane Austin Original
Austin, simplified. 'Wealthy' is changed into 'rich'. 'Regardless' is dropped. "Local families' are now 'Everyone'. And "so convinced of this truth that they see him as a potential husband' is abbreviated to 'everyone around thinks he should marry.'
And Austin Gen-z-ified. I have no words. Just pain
Okay, you know what? After reading this post, I jokingly said we should all just make a pact to reblog it five times a day forever. So I'm gonna do this louder for the people in the back:
AO3 WAS CREATED BY FANS, FOR FANS
AO3 IS RUN BY FANS (VOLUNTEERS, NO LESS)
AO3 IS PART OF THE NON-PROFIT, ORGANIZATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS
AO3 IS NOT OWNED BY ANY COMPANIES AND DOES NOT EARN REVENUE
Ao3 is like the one space left where I donât feel like Iâm drowning in capitalism. Thereâs no membership fee to access, Iâm not assaulted by clickbait ads covering every inch of my screen. Writers are generously gifting their stories. They arenât beholden to anyoneâs schedule but their own, thereâs no algorithm to feed or jump through hoops for. They write about the fandoms that inspire them, expanding on worlds or deep diving into character studies. They experiment with tropes and language and style and genre, no matter how âmarketableâ it is.
In a world where everything is increasingly commodified and regulated and restricted I cherish this little corner of the internet more fiercely.
Okay, I was just going to reblog this without commentary, but I can't keep this to myself. I'm a PhD student in environmental science and this is my fucking highway.
The first published study about climate change (that I am aware of-- feel free to point out if there's an older one) is an 1896 paper by Svante Arrhenius. He pointed out the link between the greenhouse effect and changes in atmospheric CO2.
Plate tectonics, which the geoscience community now recognizes as near indisputable, was a fringe theory until about the 1960s.
Just in case anyone thought that climate change was a "recent fad" in research.
Mike and I are heading up a new studio dedicated to expanding the Avatarverse. Hereâs our quote from EW.com (link for the full article):
âItâs hard to believe itâs been 19 years since we created Avatar: The Last Airbender. But even after all that time, there are still many stories and time periods in Aangâs world that we are eager to bring to life. We are fortunate to have an ever-growing community of passionate fans that enjoys exploring the Avatarverse as much as we do. And with this new Avatar Studios venture we have an unparalleled opportunity to develop our franchise and its storytelling on a vast scale, in myriad exciting ways and mediums. We are exceedingly grateful to Brian Robbins and Ramsey Naito for their enthusiasm and respect for the Avatar property and us as its stewards. From the start, theyâve supported our ambitious plans and created a positive, proactive environment for us. Weâre excited to be back at Nickelodeon where Avatar began, doing what we do best in the biggest way possible. We canât wait to build the great teams and productions to make all of this fantasy a reality.â â Bryan Konietzko & Michael DiMartino
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn arenât in earshot theyâll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah weâre the worst
i mean, honestly itâs amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.
english would probably have changed less since Chaucerâs time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
theyâve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodoâs books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isnât likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragornâs foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolasâ father was born.
so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we canât really tell because there werenât years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilboâs materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didnât establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isnât the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.
so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron heâs probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but heâs not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.
to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolasâ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.
so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when heâs being casual. or both!
considering legolasâ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
âŚitâs also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didnât learn as a kid.
which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and theyâre just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.
this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. thereâs a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!
Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now
Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?
Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?
Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbitsâ weird dialect this whole time: Thatâs what it sounds like to me.
Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.
Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if Morgana Pendragon met Red Daughter and they healed each otherâs wounds and fell in sweet love??????
Well, I wrote it anyways.
âYou do not know me?â
The womanâs voice is thick, low and accented with a lilt Morgana has never heard before. Rough, but pleasing to the ear. It rumbles over Morganaâs skin, leaving gooseflesh in its wake.
âI ââ Morgana hesitates, thrown off by the question. She clutches the runestone harder. As a last resort her plan was to try to send whoever was summoned back through the rift if they proved disagreeable, but this woman is even more formidable and yet somehow less threatening than Morgana could have imagined. âThe spell was to find the most powerful being in creation. I didnât know who would answer the call.â
The woman frowns. âMe? Not her?â
âWho?â
OR
In a desperate attempt to reclaim her throne, Morgana casts a dangerous summoning spell to call for aid. When the call is answered by a woman with no name and an even stranger story, the façade of vengeance and control that Morgana has cultivated so carefully begins to fall apart.