blackdiamondcat

[blackdiamondcat]

Absolutely nobody gets how much Dan Mora's design of robin!Dick Grayson means to me.

Like–???

This saved my life.

[blackdiamondcat]

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.

[blackdiamondcat]

🕑👻💤

[blackdiamondcat]

babe. I know we’re all going thru a lot rn but I just wanna give u the heads up that sesame streets future is in jeopardy. hbo has chosen not to renew it for new episodes (a series that has been going since 1969) and the residents of 123 Sesame Street no longer have a home :(

[blackdiamondcat]

Concept I saw a while ago: when danny goes ghost, he physically leaves his body so like there's just a dead teenager that Danny, Tucker, and Sam have to hide

[blackdiamondcat]

I think Dani could potentially be a good spirit for Hospitals/Ambulances/Doctors.

Dani is a sick kid in the hospital. She feels trapped and wants to explore but can’t. As a city spirit, she can go outside the hospital by following ambulances or appearing in clinics, but as a human she’s chronically ill and doesn’t often get to go out. She’s either home or at the hospital often because she needs a lot of care.

I think this could work for her bc of her previous threats of destabilization.

I’m not sure if you wanted Dani to have a ‘person’ like Jazz seems to have or help Jason, but I’m mixed on who it could be. I can think of reasons for a lot of the Batfam. Barbie could have met Dani at the hospital when she became paralyzed and visits often with books from the library. Duke could have met Dani since his parents got sick from Joker venom and got along then. Tim could have met Dani when his dad was in a coma. There’s not a real reason but I also just sometimes like Damian being a secret sweetheart and maybe he came w Bruce to the hospital as part of a charity thing and wandered off and met Dani and they got along that way, or maybe even Barbie introduced Damian to Dani bc he needed to do a volunteer thing?

As for Dani’s spirit outfit… maybe something like a plague doctor or inspired by it? I’d say a patients gown but if you follow this AU I’d bet Dani’s over wearing hospital gowns at this point given how often she has to be a patient there.

As for Dan, he’s a mix of Danny’s ghost half - human emotion + Vlad’s ghost half. Assuming you want him to not be evil (lol), I’d say a good place for him to be would be Arkham, Blackgate, and/or Bludhaven. I’d suggest Crime Alley or the Narrows too but Jazz seems to take care or help take care of Crime Alley and idk enough about the Narrows.

Dan is a bit separated from the rest of the Phantom group (honestly he reminds me of Jason a lot). He’s either not as close because he doesn’t feel like he can be or because he feels like he has to prove himself to everyone that he’s no longer evil. I feel like, in this case, he may overwork himself or stretch himself thin taking care of Arkham, Blackgate, and Bludhaven. I feel like Dan may also get along with Dick in Bludhaven since, knowing Danny’s personality and how he’s a bit of a jokster at times, he’s appreciate Dick’s puns but feel like he shouldn’t allow himself to be happy. I feel like Dick would also help since he’s seen his parents die in front of him sorta like Dan had (I think?) but is still able to keep up his cheerful personality; or, thinking back to why he became Robin in the first place (to not go out and murder the guys who killed his parents), he can sorta reflect Dan as a “what if” scenario.

For Dan’s spirit outfit, perhaps a semi-traditional police or cop uniform? (Also another reason for Dick lol). I think the police uniform bc Blackgate is a prison and Arkham is a psychiatric hospital they’d both have some type of guard or security there.

Anyway. I know they’re not exactly “cities,” especially Dani, but I think it could be spun in a way that works.

City Spirits Danny and Jazz (click for clarity)

I’ve been wanting to draw them as city spirits for awhile now, and since my final exams are nearing close, this is my reward to you guys before my classes take over my life 😃

I’m also planning for one for Dan and Dani, but I can’t decide what I want for Dani and someone suggested Arkham for Dan?? You’re so smart, but ooooh, I also want Dan as a Bludhaven spirit so bad orz can someone please help me decide omg

Notes:

+ Both Danny and Jazz have Martha’s pearls due to the fact that her death (and Thomas’ ig) is what created Batman and also Crime Alley. Jazz’s pearls are bloody due to that reason.

+ Both dress very formally and in kinda old fashioned clothing as city spirits, but when they mingle with Gotham City as civilians, both dress normally.

+ Danny focuses on helping both the citizens and the heroes as Gotham City’s spirit, but Jazz focuses mainly on Crime Alley. She can, however, move away from the place and go elsewhere, just not for long like Danny.

+ Danny’s veil is both a symbol of his death (a death shroud) and a symbol of Gotham (the black represents the corruption, the stars represent the wonder and good that can be found within the city). Jazz’s blindfold is both a symbol of death and justice, since death comes for all and justice does not discriminate.

+ I forgot to mention that I borrowed the cape knot for Danny’s tie from @aealzx lmao, your redrawing of mine was genius!

[blackdiamondcat]

Its past their bedtime

[blackdiamondcat]

i am so glad that "you wouldn't like me alive" by @ectoplasmranch was the first dp fic i read, it's so so good and will for sure be one of those fics that rattles around in my brain forever. in honor of my molecules being rearranged i would like to donate some eldritch dannys to the cause :]

[blackdiamondcat]

somethin I've noticed

[blackdiamondcat]

Writing Prompt:

Character A and B have been dating for a few months. B really likes A and despite the short amount of time they’ve spent together and thinks they might be in love.

A and B get kidnapped. There is one gun in the room. A is chained to the wall while B is free. There is one door, but it is locked. A camera is in the corner of the room and a message is on the door.

“One must die to be set free.”

B kills themselves, A is set free.

Then, C walks into the room and A runs into their arms, kissing them.

C and A are immortal psychopath lovers who love to play games on people.

The game goes as follows, either A or C fake date someone(labeled always as B in this scenario) enough to gain real feelings. Then, A and C kidnap B with whoever they are dating. B is given a choice between killing who they are dating to themselves.

A and C won’t die, but B will think they’ve killed them and be set free, forever living with that guilt. Or, they kill themselves to let their ‘lover’ free.

This game continued until one day, when faced with this same scenario, character *D* kills themselves to set A free. However, when C shows up and celebrates with A, D stands back up. D is also immortal.

[blackdiamondcat]

DONT BE AFRAID TO COMMENT ON OLD FICS DONT BE AFRAID TO COMMENT ON FICS IN A FANDOM THE AUTHOR MAY NO LONGER BE ACTIVE IN. IF THE STORY IS STILL UP LET THEM KNOW YOUR THOUGHTS IT MIGHT JUST BE THE REMINDER THAT MAKES THEIR DAY.

SINCERELY SOMEONE WHO JUST GOT A REPLY THAT MADE ME WANNA MAKE THIS POST

[blackdiamondcat]

Every kid in Crime Alley has a red bat embroidered in their jacket. It means that these kids are under the protection of the Red Hood.

Jason also uses the opportunity to teach the kids how to sew, having them each do their own bat. (given that they are old enough to do it)

[blackdiamondcat]

"I don't want to read this" is totally valid.

"This is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't want to read this because it is disgusting to me" is totally valid.

"I don't think anyone should be allowed to read or write this because it is disgusting to me" is authoritarian.

[blackdiamondcat]

Good morning Aizawa Nation, stay winning (⁠ ⁠ꈍ⁠ᴗ⁠ꈍ⁠)🙌

[blackdiamondcat]

you agree to rewatch danny phantom with your friend and where does it get you

[blackdiamondcat]

This is destroying me.

Yes it's cute but the implications of this make me want to tear Studio Bones apart with my teeth.

They've been using baby Izuku and Tenko in the OPs/EDs for a while to represent Izuku's desire to save that crying little boy at the core of who Tomura is. That makes sense. My problem isn't that tiny Izuku is running to Tomura in this scene but that HE STOPS.

It's not of his own desire to stop. He wants to keep going but he runs out of breath. His childlike unshakable optimism gets him a long way but not far enough to actually save Tomura the way he wanted.

Because YES, this is Tomura's death scene.

The only time we see Tomura look like this at this point in the series is his last conversation with Izuku as he dies and this is showing us outright that while Izuku is going to put absolutely everything into trying to save him, he is going to fall short.

He is going to run out of breath.