#share that with

[freakwiththeknifecollection]

Anyone else have periods where you just can't bring yourself to watch supernatural? Like, you miss the characters and want to watch them again but at the same time you just can't?

[lrndvs]

compliments from girls go hard

[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!

[elexuscal]

"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.

[dramatic-dolphin]

a while ago I read this sci-fi short story from the 50s where a guy is kidnapped and interrogated by aliens using a very sophisticated lie detector, but he realizes that the lie detector works off technical truth, and with some careful phrasing and misdirection, he manages to make them believe that humans are a race of immortal, overpowered, omniscient telepathic beings. and it works.

my favorite part is when he tells them that humans are "capable of transportation without the aid of spaceships or any vehicles, just by using mental power to control physical matter". it's true, we can. it's called walking.

[gayestcowboy]

this shit is the only remaining good part of twitter

[no-context-discord-quotes]

this is a typo in a textbook written by the professor of this class, it cost me $105, i will be sharing with the world

[bulbabutt]

i don't know the etiquette for posting other peoples tiktoks but the delivery of this punchline hit me like a FUCKING TRUCK please

NikhilClayton <- you should follow this guy on tiktok he's fucking hilarious

[gayvampyr]

asking people to be mindful of others when sharing a communal space (especially one you cannot just up and leave from) is not selfish or misanthropic. come on now

[wishfulsketching]

I know you’re probably super busy but I HAVE to share this with someone. I found this absolutely insane shirt at my job (thrift store) and it’s been killing me to imagine Silco in it

You can't drop something like this to my askbox and not expect me to draw something

Moms usually drop the kids off to their playdate, time for the dads to meet.

[chechula]

Birthday gift for my dear friend who loves vampires♥ . The whole thing was made in three days, I had too much fun drawing it! I created the cover drawing in the car on the way to the birthday party. So I had no time to scan it :D Well, if you enjoy reading it let me know and I will try to post more (I am making comics for my friend regularly, I am just too ashamed to translate and upload these silly things online x_x ) _____________________________________ Patreon Commissions

[adambinali]

Help Mohamad reunite his family and clear his debt

I am reaching out on behalf of my dear friend, Mohamad S., who is facing one of the most challenging times of his life. Mohamad is 37 years old and left his homeland in 2015 in search of a safer and better future. He’s a kind, hardworking man, and his small family has always been his greatest priority.

Living abroad, Mohamad has recently endured unimaginable loss and financial strain. Amidst the ongoing conflict in his homeland, his mother passed away, leaving behind his sister and her five young children—the last remaining members of his immediate family.

As the situation worsened, Mohamad managed to help his sister and her children escape to safety in Egypt, covering their immediate needs and securing a temporary refuge for them. Since then, he has been fully responsible for providing everything they need to survive during this transition.

In his efforts to support his family and cope with this devastating loss, Mohamad has found himself deeply in debt. To make matters even more difficult, he recently underwent knee surgery, which limits his ability to return to work for the foreseeable future. This has made it even harder for him to manage his financial responsibilities and the pressing need to provide his family with a stable future.

Mohamad is now working to bring his sister and her five children to join him in Belgium, where he hopes they can find stability and opportunity after all they’ve endured. This transition, however, requires significant resources that he is currently unable to meet alone.

For privacy reasons, we are not sharing Mohamad’s full name, as he has chosen to keep his identity discreet. While he initially refused the idea of asking for help, I couldn’t stand by and watch him struggle alone. I insisted on doing this for him because he deserves a chance to overcome these challenges and provide a stable future for his family.

Your contribution will help Mohamad repay the debt incurred during this difficult time, cover ongoing living expenses for his family, and assist with the costs involved in bringing them safely to Belgium.

Mohamad has been a good friend of mine for years, and I’ve always admired his resilience and generosity. Any support, no matter the size, will make an incredible difference in helping Mohamad and his family rebuild their lives after these painful experiences.

Thank you for reading his story and considering helping a man who has always done everything he can for his loved ones.

Edit: 8/1/2025

✅ Vetted by:

@bilal-salah0

Donation link:

[teathattast]

[saja-star]

a phrase that kinda bothers me when talking about women's historical roles in europe is "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear it so often, those exact words in the same order even. and once you learn a little more you realize that the massive gaping hole in that list is fiberwork. im not an expert and have no hard numbers, but i wouldnt be surprised if fiberwork took up nearly as much time as the other three tasks combined, so it's not a trivial omission.

it's not a hot take to say that the mass amnesia about fiberwork is linked to the belittlement of women's work in geneal, but i do think there's a special kind of illusion that is cast by "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear that and think "well i cook and clean and take care of children (or i know someone who does) and i have a sense of how much work that is" and you know of course that cooking and cleaning were more laborious before modern technology, but still, you have a ballpark estimate you think, when in fact you are drastically underestimating the work load.

i also think that this just micharacterizes the role of women's work in livelihoods? cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children are all sisyphean tasks that have to be repeated the next day. these are important, but not the whole picture. when we include all kinds of fiberwork—and other things, such as making candles or soap—women's work looks much more like manufacturing, a sphere we now associate more with men's work. i feel like women's connection to making and craftsmanship is often elided.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Knowledge Revenge.