#It's independent

[brucenorris007]

Zero

Summary: In a world literally on fire, a robot encounters a hedgehog wearing boots half a size too big. The meeting becomes a catalyst that breaks the cycle Zero's been caught in.

1430 words

(For extra context, scroll down to previous post before reading.)

Zero trudged through the city, optics scanning at regular intervals for any indication of magmaggots or fried chicken. The hours he could safely operate at the peak of day grew shorter as coolant became harder to find. He could make do with functioning at night for a while, and he’d done more with less, but he’d have to move on soon. Traveling between the ruins of civilization without adequate supplies posed too great a risk.

Zero couldn’t spend the day in standby mode out in the open, and he couldn’t defend himself all hours of the day if his components were overheating. His internal fans hadn’t been up to the task for decades.

Options limited, he ventured into the depths of the city, returning to the dilapidated structure that’d once been a multi-story mall. He’d investigated it once already, but he’d been working quickly and thus less thorough than he would have been otherwise. Odds that he’d overlooked something were marginally better than that he’d miraculously stumble across an auto repair shop.

He briefly inspected the integrity of what remained of the entrance–the skeleton of a revolving door, chunks of thick glass scattered outward on the pavement, steel warped and several precarious cracks in the ceiling–before carefully making his way inside.

He accessed his RAM, called up the snapshot of a degraded mall map from his last venture. The details of the mall’s contents were spotty, but it provided a grasp of the building’s layout at least, so he wouldn’t waste time going over locations he’d already searched.

He’d discovered a hardware store in the southeast sector of the second floor; while he scoured over the lawn mowers and chainsaws, his receptors registered heavy footfalls from somewhere beneath him. He had a good guess as to the cause. . .

“AAAAH!”

. . .he was somewhat less certain as to the source of the screaming that accompanied them.

After stashing what meager supplies he’d found, he left the hardware store and treaded slowly to the banister overlooking the main lobby.

Below, as he suspected, a cindaruma lumbered and lurched, hoisting and hurling molten rock as it went.

“C’mon, c’mon!”

And its target was a young, scrambling hedgehog with bright fur and quills. One who, for some reason, kept waving his hands out in front of him and over his head as he ran. If his objective was improved aerodynamics, his methods were highly counterproductive. All that racket wasn’t doing him any favors, either.

Rmbl.

It only attracted more creatures; a second cindaruma grunted and crawled up out of the ground, embers and smoke marking the spot it had spawned from.

Worse, it was the blue variant; significantly hotter and thus more lethal.

Zero ran through numerous calculations. He prioritized evasive maneuvers in the city and an offensive defense in the wastelands; he didn’t carry ammunition with him when he was gathering resources. Had he been dealing with any other monster, he could have easily interfered; cindaruma boasted an obnoxiously sturdy rock armor, though.

He’d just about resigned himself to jumping down and improvising when the hedgehog’s hand emitted a strange glow; one of the fixtures of what might have once been a fountain in the lobby teetered and smashed down against the blue cindaruma’s shoulder. The sudden impact caused it to drop the fiery boulder it’d been about to throw.

Determining that the kid would somehow manage for a moment, Zero ducked back into the hardware store.

When he returned and leapt over the banister, it was with a roaring chainsaw in each hand.

The monsters turned their attention to the new, louder and larger target Zero presented.

He twisted his frame, aiming for the red cindaruma’s head.

VRR-R-R-GK-GK!

He caught its shoulder instead; the saw in his left hand sparked and whined. Stuttered after cutting two inches into the rock before stopping short.

He pivoted upon landing and drove the other chainsaw through the glowing red gap in the armor around its right knee.

The monster groaned.

Toppled down and crashed against the floor.

Zero didn’t wait to see how the blue variant would respond.

“Run.”

“Who-wha–? Wait, I gotta–!”

He grabbed the hedgehog’s arm; turned west toward the entrance he’d used to get into the mall.

“Not a suggestion.”

Zero pulled the boy along until he started running on his own.

The blue cindaruma’s thunderous footfalls echoed behind them, distance shrinking every moment.

The boy suddenly loosed the sort of whooping cough that rattled the chest. His pace faltered.

A sharp spike in heat behind them.

Zero dove, snatching the hedgehog under his arm and throwing himself to one side.

Flaming molten rocks careened past them; glass melted on contact. The fiery missiles exploded, leaving craters behind in the building’s cement foundation.

The cindaruma loomed over them, lunging with one hand outstretched.

Whack.

PSSSH.

A bottle of precious coolant exploded against the monster’s face.

The liquid evaporated instantly; steam sizzled and covered it from head to toe.

Their pursuer roared furiously.

Kid still in hand, Zero engaged his afterburners.

He raced through the lobby.

Heard the beast give chase.

Calculated how much of a lead he had.

Broke through the warped steel frame of the door with a loud

CLANG.

Finally braked and turned his optics back.

Watched the cindaruma charge at him–

Crack.

Just as structural integrity of the entrance failed. Zero retreated further as the initial collapse gave way to more.

Twenty-four seconds later, the rumbling stopped; and his opponent buried, flame suffocated under the rubble.

“Whoa.”

His passenger muttered from under his arm. Zero deposited him on the ground and scanned the area.

“Um, than–”

“Do not stay here. The noise will attract charmanders soon.”

The hedgehog blinked. Having provided sufficient warning, Zero turned and began his circuitous route back to his base.

“Char–? Hey, wait up!”

Zero did not wait up. He heard the kid tailing him regardless.

– – – – –

“So, uh, what’s your name?” 

“. . . Designation: Zero.”

“Oh! Uh, my name is Silver. I”

“You are stupidly reckless.”

“. . . I-I need to be able to fight them.”

“. . .”

“If I can’t handle his minions, I won’t stand a chance against Iblis.”

“. . .”

“W-well, somebody has to beat him! And no one can do what I can!”

“Run around screaming and flailing?”

“Mrrr. . . I just need practice. My psychokinesis works most of the time, it’s just hard to concentrate in a fight.”

“. . .”

“Wh-what?”

“Follow me.”

– – – – –

After a bit over an hour and some largely one-sided conversation

(“Charmander. . . is that what you call the fragments of Iblis?”

“Copyright has long expired.”

“Copy-what?”)

They arrived at Zero’s base. More of a temporary storage and hideout than anything, the nearest to furnishing were his ammo stock, spare coolant and the few other things he could carry without excessively burdening himself. Subterranean, as all his bases were, for the cooling effect of being underground.

Ironic that a day had come when Zero actively sought out basements.

“Conjecture: You require equipment.”

Silver tilted his head; somehow, gravity seemed to have no effect on whether or not his quills remained erect on his head.

“What sort of equipment?”

“You experience lapses in control of your psychokinesis under duress, correct?”

Silver frowned; lowered his eyes and gave a jerking nod.

Zero turned to his stash.

“Surmise that streamlining the process of channeling psychic energy will expedite your progress on the learning curve,” he said, digging through his things. “A pair of gauntlets would be appropriate.”

Silver already channeled his psychokinetic powers through his hands, after all.

“Wait,” Silver said, head popping back up with wide eyes. “You can help me?”

“Statistically probable.”

The kid’s face nearly glowed. Zero retrieved a worn yet well-kept tablet and turned it on; his CPU was still efficient, but an external backup was always prudent.

And not solely for practicality.

Zero did not possess any great inherent kindness. He couldn’t articulate precisely why he felt inclined to aid Silver in his frankly foolhardy desire to battle the Flames of Disaster.

A prompt for an administrator name and password blinked onto the tablet’s screen.

Perhaps Zero felt moved to do something of more significance than surviving.

He typed into the onscreen keyboard; matching entries for both prompts.

In the deepest corners of his motherboard, Zero might confess that it had to do with attempting to compensate for past wrongs; the boy being a hedgehog of all things. . .

Zero Michigan Three Nine Alpha

He tapped enter.

The prompts fell away, and a prerecorded audio sample of a slightly sultry, nostalgic voice greeted him.

“Welcome back, Omega.”

@generic-sonic-fan

[ekingston]

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.

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.

Thank you all so much!

[wishfulsketching]

This is what the dynamic was like

[majaurukalo]

Disability benefits shouldn’t be tied to the income of a disabled person’s partner/spouse/parent.

Do you hear me?

DISABILITY BENEFITS SHOULDN’T BE TIED TO THE INCOME OF A DISABLED PERSON’S PARTNER/SPOUSE/PARENT.

This is the straight forward way to deprive a disabled person of their financial freedom and independence and trap them into possible abusive relationships.

[heavenbarnes]

thinking about your older bf!simon that cannot cope with being far from you.

when you’re in the shower, he’s sat on the lid of the toilet on his phone (watching those rug cleaning videos) enjoying your faint singing under the stream of water, the smell of your body wash on the cloud of steam- ready to pass you a towel or get your back.

when you’re at your desk, working from home or studying, he’s just on the other side of it reading the paper with one outstretched leg tangled with both of yours. he’s dead quiet when you’re on a call, just happy to be around.

when you’re doing laundry, collecting the clothes in the hamper and crouching to stuff them into the washer- turning around and accidentally colliding with a thick wall of muscle.

“sorry, love”

he steps aside but you can hear his soft footfalls as he continues to follow you throughout your home.

when you’re both watching something on the couch, what starts as his pinky locked with yours turns into his arm around your waist. that turns into your head on his chest, which culminates with you falling asleep in his lap with his cheek on your head and soft snores emanating from his lips.

when you grocery shop, you push the trolley but his chest is to your back, arms either side of you and hands clasped over yours on the handle. you can thank his military training for his uncanny ability to tell exactly when you’ll stop walking.

when he wakes up in the middle of the night, on a rare occasion when you’ve managed to slip out of bed without him realising, he’s immediately in a panic calling your name.

“in here, my love”

as soon as his heart settles, he realises the bathroom light was probably a dead giveaway. you’re taking a wee, you’ll be back in a minute.

that doesn’t stop a sleepy simon from leaning in the doorframe, shielding his eyes from the big light as he waits for you to finish up.

even on the short walk back to bed, you can feel fingers twisted in the back of your shirt- almost like you’re leading the way.

minute you’re both on the mattress, you’re being wrapped up in his arms, slotting you perfectly into the curve of his front- almost like you’re made for him.

(and you are)

[ionomycin]

my favorite pieces from 2024

[stil-lindigo]

this 4th of July, please consider donating to some palestinian escape funds that are close to meeting their goal!

1.Urgent Relief : Help Shadi's Family Evacuate Gaza - $12,058 / 15,000 < ONLY $3000 AWAY

(vouched for and vetted on twitter)

2. Help Moayed Escape the War in Gaza to Safety - €3,100 / 10,000

(vouched for and vetted on twitter)

3. Trapped Family in Gaza Appeals for Help to Survive - €32,430 / 38,000 < ONLY $5570 AWAY

(verified by @/nabulsi and @/el-shab-hussein)

4. Help Anas family in Gaza- $12,257 / 20,000

(verified and vetted by @/nabulsi)

5. Help two sisters from Gaza to achieve their dreams - €22,108/ 30,000

6. Help My Gazan Family Escape War: Urgent Aid for Surgery - $15,670 / 25,000

(vouched for by Thaer from this separate fund)

[feral-ballad]

Zehra Naqvi, from The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose; “Grocery Shopping”

[fafefae]

the american voting system is NOT EQUIPPED to support a 3rd party without ranked choice voting. and until we get RCV, it's one or the other. and it WILL be one or the other.

a lot of 3rd party candidates sound great, but they do not have a realistic chance at winning. be realistic. you know who does have a chance at winning? the household names, trump or harris.

splitting the vote by going 3rd party is what made trump happen in 2016, it was hillary clinton's downfall. it was USED by state sponsored internet trolls to spread propaganda, destabilize and divide the left. it was endorsed by trump himself, he tried it in 2020 too, and he's doing it again now because he knows it might be the only chance he has at winning.

be VERY wary of anyone telling you vote 3rd party. it's trump or harris. it won't be stein, de la cruz, or sherman, or fucking anybody else ive never heard of, because nobody is talking about independent candidates, and EVERYONE is talking about trump and harris.

it will be trump or harris for president, and it will be trump if you vote 3rd party. and ill tell you as an anarchist, i would rather have kamala harris and all her flaws in office over the fascist donald trump who would see me and my queer siblings and my friends and family of color dead.

do not split the fucking vote.

[jean-wei]

See You! Spring 2024. A new short comic. : ) Debuted at TCAF 2024. [edit: i've now added a PDF of this comic in my store! : ) ]

[nyancrimew]

can you explain the ai thing to me as though I were a small child I am in fact very stupid and don't understand what the point being made was supposed to be

the point i am trying to make it that ai is fundamentally a labor issue (and just more broadly a capitalism issue) and should be treated as such, any attempts at trying to classify what makes something "not real art" is a slippery slope leading towards fascism and fundamentally irrelevant in the fight against unethical (uses of) AI. the same goes for any attempts at just making copyright laws more strict, this has never helped any independent artists and never will, at best it'll make any sort of derivative art (including fanart, remixes, collages, etc) basically impossible to do unless you're a massive corporation with an unlimited legal budget.

[chongoblog]

I have never felt more patriotic than I am in this moment

[lesbianjudasiscariot]

[whenweallvote]

Many of us are taught that slavery came to an end with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but for enslaved people in Texas, freedom didn’t come until June 19, 1865.

Swipe to learn about the history of Juneteenth, and why it’s a celebration of freedom, culture, and progress.

[todoga]

I'm just crazy about the actors AUs...