aroacedm

[aroacedm]

at the end of the long horrible story was you

[aroacedm]

Yeah sure I'll add that to my belief system

[aroacedm]

my fav XB v. Mumbo case bits

"Objection!" "On what basis?" "On the objection basis!" "Sustained."

"I will object, this outfit reminds me of Angus Young and I like that." "QUIET, FORMER CONVICT OF THE COURT!"

"This maaaaaannnnn... has no dexterity. I don't even know how he made it to this court."

"I'm thinking of pulling a curveball. We're installing....... a jury."

"As co-owner of-" [LOUD YAWN] "Don't listen to him. Don't listen to him. You're doing great 😊🥰😍"

"I'm so confused, I don't understand the law."

"OBJECTION!!! He was mean :("

"Yeah, back in your jail cell. I mean your chair >:)"

"......Am I able to represent myself?"

"Maybe he's more dexteritous than we thought."

"Here in AMERICA.... Mr Beans......"

"ITS CALLED MINECRAFT WE'RE ALL MINERS YOU FOOL"

"Scar, if I was to single out Cub, do you think that would go well for me?" "........I CALL CUB TO THE STAND!!!"

[All court proceedings stop for Bdubs to do a magic trick]

"I have a bit of tinnitus, so if we could get a doctor working on that...."

"Can't prosecute success 😏"

"He literally owns a mine, so maybe mention that, Scar?" "....He has a character that mimes things??" "NO-"

"That's not how sound works!" "OBJECTION!" "I'm objecting on physics!"

"Please step forward onto the punishment carpet." [PIT OPENS]

"As I was saying... uhm... uhgggghh, what was I saying before they all died and stuff..."

"Obviously I'm super successful regardless of the noise and everyone else being poor is just a skill issue. Right, cooooollllll, I think that was it."

"Do you have your law license?" "I do not, your honor." "Okay, then what are you talking for????"

"If this case is lost from our side..... all hope is lost.... because it's lost anyways."

"Here's my verdict... and my punishment, btw......" "Ohh well. Punishment probably implies what the verdict may well be."

[LOUD GIDDY GIGGLES] "Are you celebrating???? Don't celebrate!" "Oh, no sir, I was just crying."

"Mumbo, I sentence you to be the server's butler for two weeks. In hopes that you will learn manners."

"Docm77, you will be sentenced to TWENY FOUR HOURS AGAIN!!!! IN THE SKYBLOCK"

[aroacedm]

this will be the year I finally convince everyone to abandon New Year's resolutions in favour of Yule Boasting, the clearly superior tradition

[aroacedm]

every time i listen to “you’re a mean one mr. grinch” i can’t help but sit there and think “what did the grinch do to hurt you?” because dude just stands there for 2 minutes and 58 seconds and drags the grinch into the dirt

[aroacedm]

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

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.

Thank you all so much.

[aroacedm]

halara my beloved /p

you can say what you want about rain code but it so casually having a nonbinary character who’s exclusively referred to with they/them prounouns by everyone around them and who’s color palette is literally the nonbinary flag is awesome to be honest. their name is halara nightmare. that’s the coolest name ever. they show up to beat the shit out of the police in multiple parts of the game. they’re mysterious and a bit of an asshole but they also like cats. everyone thinks they’re so awesome and cool and they are. halara nightmare

[aroacedm]

this is all I could think of when I saw skizz’s Winnie the Pooh build

[aroacedm]

A group of rough looking boys walked past me today and all I heard of their conversation was “he’s got that anxiety disorder bro so I went with him so he’d be more comfortable” and it made me realise the world isn’t all that bad

[aroacedm]

You: I think I'm gay

The welcoming Skizzleman:

[aroacedm]

guess the build my beloved

[aroacedm]

I think SVSSS would be so much funnier if Shen Yuan can hear soundtracks. just.

He walks in a room and hear the ambient music suddenly turning ominous, immediately grabs Liu Qingge and turns around while thinking "Nope, nu-uh, not this way! Go back that way— WHERE DID THE DOOR GO?"

Just talking with Luo Binghe and maybe looking at him a little to long when he suddenly hears romantic music and being so confused because where even is Luo Binghe's future wive(s)? Why is there romantic music??

In a mystery mission and trying to find out who the suspect of [x] crime is only to hear subtle liet motifs pertaining to one character throughout the day so he only needs to bullshit evidence, but then he overthinks it and go "wait, if I were in a movie this obvious use of telling lief motif could just be a red herring and they might not be the perpetrator..."

Shen Yuan having a quick reaction time only because he can hear battle music or strange sudden tense silences even before something happens because obviously that means a jumpscare is coming

Talking to Yue Qingyuan and having those sad nostalgic dead wife music suddenly playing LMFAOOO

Grieving music after he pushed down Luo Binghe into the abyss and he's still in denial about being sad because of course he is

[aroacedm]

After I made this post, I just had the scenario in mind...

And please read Joel's boxes in his hysteric Voice.

[aroacedm]

guess i gotta prepare for you finding autism in every post i’ve ever made.

damn

Hello, World. i am the Autism Detector™, I detect autism, i know. S H O C K I N G.

If you suspect any form of Autism™ to be present in any post, Please, dont hesitate to mention me and ill confirm your allegation. Thank you.

im a minor, genius

Note for those who bothered to actually click on the read more: This blog is owned by @a-thalassophiliac, if you want to talk to me directly. go ahead, idc.

[aroacedm]

[aroacedm]

a quick step by step guide on what to do if you come back to your apartment and find yourself locked out because your front door is frozen shut

kick the bottom of the door for 10 minutes

text your landlord

remember your landlord is on vacation and also in her mid 50′s so it takes about 36 hours to receive a response

briefly wonder why the fuck you moved the canada

remember that college tuition is significantly cheaper here than in the united states 

look up and notice your cat is at the window, staring at you. he paws at the window lightly and meows. it’s devastating. his eyes are so big and imploring. decide that you have to get inside your apartment at all costs. not even god himself can stop you from feeding your cat his chicken wet food dinner. frida kahlo herself could descend from the heavens and ask “hey you wanna bang?” and you’d say “hell yeah but first let me open this door so i can feed my cat his dinner”

remember there is a starbucks 3 blocks down the street from you

enter. the barista gives you a weird look for entering a starbucks at 7pm on a tuesday

order a venti cup of hot water. you order in french because the barista just said “bonjour” instead of “bonjour, hi.” you have a strong american accent. you hit the r in merci a little too hard to compensate. you embarrass yourself.

exit the starbucks clutching the massive cup of hot water in your hands. it’s burning your fingers.

return. methodically pour the starbucks cup of water all over the the door frame. it begins moving a little but still wont open

back up

ensure your doc martens are properly gripping the sheet of ice covering the ground. many people have told you to stop wearing doc martens in the winter, despite your protests that theyre actually the ideal winter boot. also, you’re a lesbian and punk’s not dead

release a pterodactyl screech and sprint towards the door, slamming the full force of your pathetically tiny 5′2″ 110lb body into it

you dont know any of your neighbors so you dont care about maintaining your pride anyways

the door swings open

run up the stairs

open the actual door to your apartment and yell MOMMY’S HOME MY LITTLE BITCHASS BABY BOY DONT WORRY at your cat

cat flings his body to the ground and starts purring like he does every time you come home

write tumblr post

[aroacedm]

rb to have a very aspec 2025