huewrite

[huewrite]

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.

[huewrite]

[huewrite]

It's Christmas morning.

I woke up first.

So I gave myself the present of writing something short and sad. Something no one will read but me. Because the best present I could give myself, was a story for my own personal joy. Like a secret no one gets to know.

[huewrite]

.....wait it's not July 2010? ... Dammit. That explains the increased responsibilities I have all of a sudden. Excuse me I have to make pies as gifts.

shit man tomorrow is christmas eve i swear yesterday was June 2010

[huewrite]

Passive voice. My editors fuss at me a lot over it. Going "Hey... you did it again."

And every time I'm like.... damnit.

I thought I didn't this time.

shit.

what are your worst writing habits?

confession time!

It's difficult for me to write in chronological order. I have a poor attention span when I write because I frequently become distracted by new ideas. To avoid forgetting them, I jump to other parts of the scene or story (or sometimes to a different project altogether!) to write them in. So a lot of my drafts are an incoherent stew of dialogue, prose, and characters that only I can decipher the meaning of. It's a hell of a time editing. And because I jump around so often it's a struggle for me to focus on writing one scene at a time. I'm trying to get better.

Also, I'm guilty of not writing when I'm having a lot of good ideas. Then when I do sit down to write, I have to try to capture the ideas when they are older and less clear.

[huewrite]

Lick it

Enoki totally was one of those kids who would take the dare to lick something. Why? Ze wanted to know what everything tasted like.

Don't worry ze didn't eat non eatable things. But part of hir would wonder... what did plastic taste like? Did the game carterage really taste that bad?

Did chocolate and mustard go together? (they did not)

So watch as ze tries to explain this to En'mat

[huewrite]

I think it's a book series

well I know it will be

And I am going to have to plan covers

and make design choices

and make sure it's consistent because we are NOT having not matching spines for the love of all that's good.

And maybe some tweaks to the current cover

.... good thing my artist works for transformers.

[huewrite]

I could use it honestly

[huewrite]

You Can't Eat At Everybody's House

Mostly because of sanitation and cross contamination issues. Why am I bringing this up? Because in the latest chapter Enoki is starting the Melomel making process. You have to have everything clean and sanitary. more than normal or you will get nasty things growing!

So, if you are inspired to make wine or something from my story for the love of whatever you trust in- KEEP IT CLEAN!

I mean it.

I swear I'm gonna come teleport over to some people's homes over this.

[huewrite]

Today was a rough day.

Share your favorite recipes or food if you don't know how to make it.

[huewrite]

As a gender fluid person, I appreciate this. It is something that happens a lot.

As a gender fluid person I still went with the trope because lord do I have jokes when someone in a story demands to know Enoki's original equipment and hir response to that. It's a lot of the stuff I wish I could do honestly.

Besides my dwarves are going to more than make up for things with their pronouns and how they view gender without shapeshifting. Which reminds me I need to make that pronoun chart.

Okay, I'm really not trying to make myself sound like some kind of amazing Cis ally here.

But writing "Nobody Can Help You" (The Superhero story I'm working on and will start posting next year) I've written several trans/non-binary characters and made a conscious choice to not make the shape-shifting character be one of them.... Because it felt like it would have been a cop out.

[huewrite]

Research and prep work

So this novel, being a fantasy novel, you would think wouldn't need that much prep work for research. But since I want to include recipes and processes, it does. I did so much research on how wine and mead making was done for someone who does not drink.

Anyway, I have a new chapter up. If you want to help me forget how long until they announce the top ten, feel free to go look at the story.

I think I will nap now. And talk myself out of making wine for fun.

[huewrite]

Top 25 is out and...

The Reincarnated Shapeshifter's Godly Feast... MADE IT!! YES!

Now I have to wait till probably Christmas to find out if I made it to top 10. Wish me luck y'all.

And for those curious... here are the rest of the top 25!

[huewrite]

I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD.  If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?

[huewrite]

I'm going to add to this teacher paperwork that's not grading papers (a fair go to but there is more) 1. Writing lesson plans in the principal's desired format (this sometimes means writing it the way that makes sense to you first then doing it their way)

2. Filling out questionnaires about child's behavior for academic skills for the special education team

3. Creating a document of suggestions for accommodations and modifications for a student

4. Feedback forms for parents

5. Feedback forms on campus performance

6. Feedback forms on admin performance (note they say these are anon, but we know they aren't 100%)

7. Committee obligations

8. Creating emergency sub plans

9. Making actual sub plans

10. Checking classroom fees/waivers/safety forms.

11. creating classroom project rubrics.

12. REMAKING the rubrics (because language use changes and so must the directions)

13. Call logs.

14. Incident reports.

15. Positive behavior reports (yes even middle and high school level)

16. Grants. Because we are broke and need money to fund classrooms.

17. Purchase requests or reimbursements.

We don’t talk enough about how fanfiction writers love to give character large amounts of non-specific paperwork they hate doing

[huewrite]

Milestone!

Well win or lose this round, I got a big thing to be proud of.

I not only passed 100 subs but I hit 1K likes.

eeeeeeee

Thank you guys.

[huewrite]

habits update

probably the worst day to post a comic update (holiday weekend + sunday), but anyway, here's a new comic.

it's about how a yearly event has become a new habit. i did it for the sake of the habit and not the event this year x)

website: https://dreamdb.com/habits-54 tapas: https://tapas.io/episode/3372380

also, something something dragon age veilguard 👀