#ais is writing

[ageless-aislynn]

Okay, I'm doing something that I'm legit excited about. I can't even TELL you how long it's been since I've felt actual glee when it comes to writing! I'm not doing NaNo this month, I'm doing

Yes, friends, I'm digging up every single one of my WIPs (that I want to finish; trufax, I've gone through and quietly closed some of them on Ao3 over the years when I knew I wasn't going back to them 😞) and I'm going to write a minimum of ONE WORD ON EACH OF THEM. If I write more, yay, but if I write just a single word on each of them in the month of November, it's party time!

In doing so, I found what might be the BEST writing I've ever done. Steel yourself for this, friends, I don't want any of you to get knocked out of your chair by this brilliance!

/END SCENE

😂😂😂 Seriously, though, this really was exciting because you see that notation of Chapter 4 there? This is one of my Flash fics that I kinda forgot I had in progress. 😱I discovered that I have 3 CHAPTERS of "Split" written and the 4th started, which is the final fic to finish off my Ghost of Eobard Thawne series (along with "Equal Opportunity" and "Haunted").

I wrote 3 chapters and totally forgot I had them. Granted they're in super-duper yeee-ikes rough shape, as much notes as, you know, actual fic, like my ch4 example here, lol, but still! It was like reading somebody else's work, no lie, because it's been 4 years that they've been just chillin', hanging out in a Word doc without apparently still living in my brain, too. 🤷‍♀️

⬆️Literally me seeing those chapters, lol

I'm going to do a proper list of what I'm planning on adding a single word to later but I just had to share my happy on finding something that's inexplicably put the excitement back in writing for me!

Woo-hoo, watch me go, I'm running around with a plant excitement! 😂💖💖💖

[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!

[arson-jellyfish69]

AI disturbance overlays for those who don't have Ibis paint premium. found them on tiktok

[meluiloth]

Since the whole thing with NaNoWriMo has gone down, I've noticed that one of their former sponsors, Ellipsus, has cut contact with NaNoWriMo because they do not support their stance on AI; I didn't know what Ellipsus was, but upon further research I've found that they are a writing platform that works a lot like Google Docs and Microsoft Word, only with a heavier leaning on the story-writing aspect and connecting with other writers - and they also completely denounce any use of AI, both in the writing process itself and in the use of their platform. I really appreciate that.

Since this is the case (and since I've noticed Google has begun implementing more AI into their software), I've decided to give Ellipsus a try to see if it's a good alternative to Google Docs (my main writing platform). It's completely free and so far, I've found it simple to use (although it is pretty minimal in its features), and I really like the look of it.

I figured I'd spread the word about this platform in case any of you writers would want to give it a try, and if you do, let me know how you like it!

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[monsoon-of-art]

[ellipsus-writes]

We know many of you have seen NaNoWriMo's recent statements on generative AI...

Well, we have too—and that's why we've made the decision to retract our sponsorship of NaNo.

Your support and belief in human creativity, transparency and collaboration mean everything to us, and we're committed to staying true to that. Thank you all! 💙

You can read our full statement here.

The Ellipsus team xo

[charlesoberonn]

[beepboopappreciation]

Is this anything

[imastoryteller]

20 Compelling Positive-Negative Trait Pairs

Here are 20 positive and negative trait pairs that can create compelling character dynamics in storytelling:

1. Bravery - Recklessness: A character is courageous in the face of danger but often takes unnecessary risks.

2. Intelligence - Arrogance: A character is exceptionally smart but looks down on others.

3. Compassion - Naivety: A character is deeply caring but easily deceived due to their trusting nature.

4. Determination - Stubbornness: A character is persistent in their goals but unwilling to adapt or compromise.

5. Charisma - Manipulativeness: A character is charming and persuasive but often uses these traits to exploit others.

6. Resourcefulness - Opportunism: A character is adept at finding solutions but is also quick to exploit situations for personal gain.

7. Loyalty - Blind Obedience: A character is fiercely loyal but follows orders without question, even when they're wrong.

8. Optimism - Denial: A character remains hopeful in difficult times but often ignores harsh realities.

9. Humor - Inappropriateness: A character lightens the mood with jokes but often crosses the line with their humor.

10. Generosity - Lack of Boundaries: A character is giving and selfless but often neglects their own needs and well-being.

11. Patience - Passivity: A character is calm and tolerant but sometimes fails to take action when needed.

12. Wisdom - Cynicism: A character has deep understanding and insight but is often pessimistic about the world.

13. Confidence - Overconfidence: A character believes in their abilities but sometimes underestimates challenges.

14. Honesty - Bluntness: A character is truthful and straightforward but often insensitive in their delivery.

15. Self-discipline - Rigidity: A character maintains strong control over their actions but is inflexible and resistant to change.

16. Adventurousness - Impulsiveness: A character loves exploring and trying new things but often acts without thinking.

17. Empathy - Overwhelm: A character deeply understands and feels others' emotions but can become overwhelmed by them.

18. Ambition - Ruthlessness: A character is driven to achieve great things but willing to do anything, even unethical, to succeed.

19. Resilience - Emotional Detachment: A character can endure hardships without breaking but often seems emotionally distant.

20. Strategic - Calculative: A character excels at planning and foresight but can be cold and overly pragmatic in their decisions.

These pairs create complex, multi-dimensional characters that can drive rich, dynamic storytelling.

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+ If you find my content valuable, consider Support This Blog on Patreon!

[ageless-aislynn]

Guess what, frens? I wrote almost 700 words tonight and I was actually, legit enjoying writing them! I can't even tell you how long it's been since I was able to get back in that headspace again! 🥳💃

Only two slight problems:

It's not any of my WIPs and it's for freakin' Dead Rising.

I'm not ever, ever, evvvver going to post it anywhere, so it's pretty worthless OTHER than...

I was writing. I was enjoying writing and that feels actually pretty major to me right now, even if it's not "for" anything else. It's for me. And Frank. And the OC I just made up but am writing in second person so I can try to get back into the voice for my Reader fics.

I haven't felt actual inspiration in SO long. I've missed you, old friend. Maybe there's some hope after all?

PS - I was hoping that getting back into vidding would help jumpstart the ol' writing muse again but, well. I'm scared putting Vegas back on will destabilize Georgette again. I cannot TELL you how nice it's been to just have a working computer after nearly half a year of daily struggling and of hours of research that led to no solutions. It's really hard to make myself do something that has even a tiny chance of undoing it all, you know? I dunno. I'll worry about that later. 🤷‍♀️

[novella-november]

Novella November 2024 Announcement Post

Hate AI, but love writing challenges?

Want to take part in a global, fun project to write a Novella in one month?

Grab some friends, and take part in Novella November, by writing 1,000 words a day for the month of November, ending with a 30,000 word Novella to test and stretch your novel-writing skills!

Your goal is not perfection, but merely getting into the habit of writing a litte bit every single day :D

No website, no sign-ups -- Just a community initiative to write using only your own word!

What are the rules? Just Three so far!

#1 - No AI

#2 - No Plagiarizing

#3 - Wordcount for the month should only come from what you write during the month.

What does that mean?

Only words written during November should go towards your Wordcount for the month... but! Feel free to use your 30k words as a continuation of previous writing, or just make it the first 30k words in a longer novel!

Don't think you can write a whole entire 30k word story? Write a series of short stories that total up to 30k!

Not ready to write original works yet? Write a 30k word fanfiction that you can post after the month is over!

Share your writing experience, tips, encouragement, and questions in the #Novella November tag!

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EDIT, from the tags: Want a progress tracker? Track your progress with TrackBear!

https://trackbear.app/

Don't have a word processor? Use LibreOffice , the free and open-source alternative to Microsoft Word!

Want to organize/storyboard your Novel and don't want to pay a subscription? Try 7writer by Simon Haynes!

Want to be able to listen to your story aloud for proofreading using TTS (text to speech)? Try Balabolka!

Or, create some custom progress / Goal Cards in advance you can fill out as you reach word goals! For ideas and templates, search this blog for "goal cards" :D

Want to do a writing challenge in more than just November? Check out my ideas here for year round challenges to keep you writing consistently! Got feedback? Send it in, I'd love to see everyone's ideas!

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EDIT 2: I almost forgot to mention, if you are unable to write/type your story, you can also narrate/dictate your story to your preferred recording device!

If you're doing a Recording only and it doesn't automatically generate a transcript, it would obviously be hard to judge the word count -- but you're also working with a lot of obstacles, so I'd say if you're able to complete your story via voice recording from start to finish, you've definitely achieved the goal!

Edit #3: added the title "Novella November 2024 announcement post" to the top to make it more standard with my Ominous October and Drabble December posts (will be updating Outline October shortly) , added "Official Announcement Post 2024" to the tags so people can easily find the monthly events for 2024, and added a bit of bold to the third bullet point in the original post from September 2nd 2024 for emphasis.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[ayeforscotland]

“Author of 25+ best-selling Pride & Prejudice variations”

Yeah, no.