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hballegro · 5 months ago

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alright here's the essay under the cut.

entirely just my experience w/ MASH, almost no editing [just spelling mistakes and a few apostrophe misuses]. fair warning, my father was [is] an alcoholic and a horrible person, and i mention that a bit, so if thats something you're sensitive to, bewarned.

My story with M*A*S*H begins a hundred years ago when I was somewhere between 5 and 8, old enough to watch television but not old enough to remember how old I was when I was doing it. The childhood I had was overall unremarkable, marred only by my pitiful excuse for a father that parented by either drinking or being hungover on the couch in between screaming at his children or beating his wife. Unfortunately, he is part of this story, but only accidentally. See, he used to do all that stuff in our unfinished basement, on an old ugly couch, hiding from his family all day. Then, eventually, he decided he liked the couch and television upstairs better, and plagued the family room for many years instead, putting whatever he wanted to watch on instead of letting his children watch cartoons. I ended up liking The Three Stooges quite a lot, less out of actually thinking it was fun and more out of it being the only thing he’d put on that I found remotely entertaining, so I was taking what I could get. We kept the old burned CDs he’d made of them after he moved out.

Anyway. My mother had (and still has) a television in her room (it used to be their room, but she kicked him out) that she could avoid him with. Not wanting to be around the violent cesspool of a person on my couch, I’d sometimes crawl to her room, so as not to let him see me and have him make me come over and listen to some music or whatever he wanted. Old guitarist reliving his glory days or something, I couldn’t tell you. But anyway, I’d enter her room and sit down on her bed with her or on the floor, and we’d watch TV. More often than not, she’d put on MeTV, because she watched those old shows with her own father, and it was a bright spot in her memory that gave her some escapism too. There were a lot of shows on there, but I only really ever remembered things like Gilligan’s Island, ALF, Columbo, Bewitched, The Twilight Zone, and, of course, M*A*S*H.

I liked the other shows, of course. I remember them fondly, especially Gilligan’s Island, maybe it was the catchy theme song with words I could learn. I didn’t like how brown and gross Columbo was, but my mom explained that that’s just how it looked back then. I thought the puppet on ALF was funny, and The Twilight Zone scared me, but I was still interested. I remember enough of Bewitched to remember the nose wiggle and constantly mix it up with I Dream of Jeannie for some reason. Really, anything was better than watching the same episode of Farscape again, which I’ve heard is actually a very good show, but my father kept forgetting that he’d already made me start watching it, and so every viewing session was just the pilot. That’s also the reason I never learned Spanish.

But then I got to M*A*S*H. I won’t lie to you and say that, as a wizened 5-to-8-year-old, I could ‘tell something was special’ about this show. It was a show. It was a show that I remember looking at my mom during, and seeing her really happy. Later she told me, after watching it with me in present day, that she would watch it with her own father, before her parents got divorced. Her father more or less was not present in her life after the split, and that happened when she was 14-ish. The show started airing when she was the age I was when I watched it with her, and she and her father made a weekly thing of it. Neither of us at that age should have watched it, but for both of us, it was forming a little bright spot in our minds, a good dream with a parent when times were tough.

I remember laughing, even if I didn’t get all the jokes. I remember thinking I liked the shade of red one of the characters wore, and also the shade of dark blue the same character wore sometimes. I remember one or both of my siblings being there sometimes, laughing along. One of my siblings told me recently that B.J. Hunnicutt and John ‘Trapper’ McIntyre, both filling roles as doubles partners for Benjamin Franklin ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce, had merged into the same person in their memory. I thought that was hilarious; how could they ever think those were the same person! B.J. Hunnicutt had a mustache! Imagine my surprise re-watching season 4’s opener, ‘Welcome to Korea’, featuring a clean-cut fresh-faced Mike Farrell, lacking the horse brush I had so clearly remembered him housing under his nose.

But the rewatching, yes, the rewatching. It started innocently enough. Between breaks at college, far beyond my young-youth, the real youth people mean when they use that word, my mother opened it up on the tv and put it on. No matter what era you go to in our household, the TV was always going. Most of the time no one was watching it, sometimes blatantly, loudly, explosively chattering and guffawing and gasping with our own business and ignoring it entirely. It was background noise, we all needed it, so we always had it. But something a little strange happened; my mother was watching it, as she often did when she put something on in the evenings to massage her brain to bed after a long day at work. I was typing away at something on my laptop, like I am now, sitting on the couch with her, which I am also doing now (although she’s long gone to bed), and I looked up.

I saw Hawkeye.

It didn’t feel like a rush of emotion, it didn’t feel like something important was happening. That was just my old friend. Looking absolutely horrible with the haircut he was rocking in the pilot, but I remembered him. The pilot doesn’t open with the theme, as I recognized that as soon as it played, it opens with golf, a little vignette of the camp before the choppers come in with wounded. I saw Hawkeye, I saw his shirt, and it really was like when you see an old friend, one you can’t really remember what all you did with, or where you met, or even each other’s names anymore, but you know they mean something to you. You knew this person, and you liked them, you liked them enough that even though you forgot everything else, you remember the love that was there.

And it was a very small thing that happened, and it didn’t happen with every episode, but I would pause my music. My own background noise to drown out everyone else’s background noise, blasting into my headphones. I’d pause my music, read the subtitles, hear them faintly through muffled ears, and laugh along. Smile when I’d see a smile, and a little more than half pay attention.

I went back to college, life went on, we only got maybe to the beginning of season two, but my mom didn’t continue without me. She waited, and eventually, I came home for the summer, summer of 2024.

She put it on again, and the same thing happened. But this time, I way more than half paid attention. I really paid attention. By the time we got to Abyssinia, Henry, I completely paused whatever I was doing when it was on and sat, laptop open, head at a 45 degree angle to watch the TV. I’d still futz around during commercial breaks, but I waited for the commercial breaks to do anything now. More and more it warmed my heart, to see all these old friends I’d forgot about, drag them all out of the closet, finally see B.J. Hunnicutt with that stupid mustache again for the first time in over 15 years at least—it was all so amazing. I was laughing at this show that came out over 20 years before I was even born. My parents hadn’t even met yet when this thing ended. Then, of course, because of the way my brain unfortunately works, it is now all I can think about it, to the point I’ve convinced several people to watch it just by virtue of never-shutting-the-hell-up.

And then? I finally got to see all my friends go home.

I remember the night I watched the finale with my mother. We’d gotten to the penultimate episode, and we’d paused. It was near 8ish, near my mother’s bedtime, and she and I both agreed we could not handle the finale that night, it was too much. And so we put on something, My Name is Earl, anything to make noise, something funny, something light. That’s how the next several days went; do we feel like we can handle the end? No. Tonight? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe after dinner? It was a long day.

But then, after dishes had been cleared and we were both sitting quietly, the sun had already gone down, and she proposes we watch it.

So we did.

I don’t cry at things anymore. I used to cry all the time as a kid, scraped knee, called an idiot by a sibling, way too much crying even for a kid. I got it out of my system, apparently, because now I’m an adult and I have trouble with making tears, and when they do come, they sneak up on me. The last time I remember crying was at my grandmother’s funeral, months ago, and before that, I have no idea. I get misty-eyed, sure, but nothing makes me boohoo.

The same held for the finale. Contrasted heavily by my mother, the woman that regularly cries at especially-touching commercials, shedding a few for every other scene (the bus revelation, the final meal, Charles’s music adventure finale, the wedding dress, every single goodbye, and of course the big one at the end), I was mostly quiet. I remember it ending, and thinking, well, that was about the best finale I’d ever seen. I also thought about how I’d seen strikingly few finales, and that I ought to see more series through til the end. I spoke with my mother a bit about it, we had some good moments from the program tossed back and forth, and she went to bed.

Then I took a shower, and after I got out, the floodgates busted. I was boohooing alright, blubbering too, but I couldn’t point to why. Sure, there were moments in the episode worthy of tears, but this was full sobbing, aching and pitiful and messy. I just left it as something not to worry about, and went on. Since then, on my own, I’ve rewatched select episodes, watched the finale (again) with the sibling that confused Trapper and B.J., done three paintings of stills from the show, made a miniature version of the signpost for my mom, and started writing again for the express purpose of doing things with these characters, and I’ve only now put a fine point on it. It’s a threefold answer of why I fell apart leaving the shower after watching an episode of television that aired 40 years ago.

The first is simple; I have got it in my head that I need to be alright for everyone. If I’m happy, then everything is okay. I think it’s a relic from what made me stop crying, this need to tell everyone, “Hey, I’m the crybaby, so if I’m okay, then really, everything is okay!” My tears are (were) meant to be shed in private. They were my own cross to bear, especially for places like the bathroom where I could get privacy, as I shared a room with a sibling growing up. This is something I’m getting better about.

The second answer is very warm; I finished M*A*S*H with my mom. I remember my grandfather, though he wasn’t too present in my life, and I loved him. He passed when I was young, but I was old enough to remember him, and his death date is near my birthday. My birthday is actually near a lot of either death-dates or birthdays of people that are now dead that my mom loved very much, so I am constantly reminded that my birth is the only good thing that happens to her that month. Finishing the show with her was special. We did it. It’s a tradition now. I don’t plan to have kids, but the future may be strange. At the very least, I know at least one sibling does, so I’ll just have to make sure their kids watch it, too. I don’t have anything of my grandfather’s, his family wasn’t kind to mine and took pretty much everything when he died, but now I have this show. And I have this with my mother. It keeps my heart warm.

And lastly, the thing responsible for the most boohooing, is that, like I said; I got to see my friends go home.

I didn’t really think about it hard, but these were my little friends. I couldn’t remember them, but I remembered that I loved them. That they were something that made me happy, and made my very sad mother happy when I was little. They were funny, they were going through a very bad time and they were still being nice to each other and doing their best. They laughed, cried, cried some more, laughed some more. They drank, but in a safer way than what I knew of it at home, so it felt okay. They hugged, they fought, they loved each other. Then they were locked away in a little memory in my heart, and they sat there for over a decade, nearly two. And then those lovely people that made my life a little bit better finally, finally,

Got to go home.

A catharsis.

Everything isn’t perfect, but all of us are somewhere better now. We have new problems. We have old scars. But the big bad is over. A little part of me healed. It was okay, finally. They got home. It’s okay.

And if I can pick up a show from the 70’s about the 50’s that’s also still about the 70’s and the Vietnam war about all war that’s also about love and family and surgery with a cast that’s almost all gone now that so painfully soldered its place in my heart that watching the end of it all put me in a puddle on the floor of my bathroom at 11 at night, if I can wait 15 years and still manage to rouse these old soldiers and send them home, a little cracked but finally safe,

I think B.J. Hunnicutt can drive those 3,000 miles to a little place in Maine to see his best friend.

#mash #mash 4077 #m*a*s*h #mashblr #mashblogging #sorry gamers we're in our feels this morning just like we were at 2 am last night #it also helps explain why im riding this hyperfixation so hard. not only am i unmedicated #but also this show has a lot of latent emotions for me entangled with memories i didnt remember til recently #writing fanfic got my brain on the Writing train again and at roughly 1:20ish last night i started writing and couldnt stop #finally went to bed at around 2:10 am. way too late for me 1 is already pushing it #didnt tell anyone abt the bathroom thing after the finale and lied to my family that i didnt cry cause i was embarrassed #but we workin on that. we're getting Better #but yeah if its not legible i Apologize its just Me Brain with No Edits and Little Thought #and also 1-2 am so. not the sharpest. hence repeated phrases #godspeed god bless crags fail to trip your feet etc etc smooches #.yappin

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ekingston · 4 days ago

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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.

#fandom #plagiarism #AO3 #speechify #word-stream #Cliff Weitzman #writers on tumblr #fan fic writing #AI plagiarism #independent authors #Ofek Weitzman #please share

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