unluckytech

[unluckytech]

New laptop new integrated graphics test

Me: installs game expecting to get an hour of decent play before Intel graphics crashes.

Game pack launcher: video takes over twice as long as audio to get to game selection.

Me: "Ok funny but yikes this is a menu that its struggling with

[unluckytech]

And people wonder why creatives do not like people who use ai

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.

[unluckytech]

Reblog if you think asexuality is a legitimate sexuality.

I'm trying to prove something.

[unluckytech]

As someone who grew up on disney sequels Ive had to explain 'Yes there were two sequels to the animated 'The Little Mermaid' as well as a series multiple time this week from a conversation starting with 'The Princess and The Frog.

This is what happens when I go to goodwill

[unluckytech]

Sorry Alice but we did see Wendy actively try for a fight.

Alice did have intimidation in the climax of her film but didn't move to attack.

[unluckytech]

If your looking to burn to disc windows and mac os appear to have it as part of their media software and linux can do so via their command line or by the software brasero

you don't need to write a dark deconstruction of Peter Pan where he's willing to kill people and his state of eternal childhood makes him morally ambiguous, JM Barrie already wrote one and it's called Peter Pan

[unluckytech]

Reblog if you love all things Peter Pan so that we may follow each other

[unluckytech]

Picked up a new book

So I've been reading the Disney twisted tales series and they've started adapting some of the books into graphic novels: Part of your world, Straight on till morning, and next year Almost there. Straight on till morning had its graphic adaptation release a month ago and I don't think I've gone through a book this fast in years. I got it from the nearest Barnes and Noble to my house, and read it fast enough that my mom was worried that I wouldn't get $20 dollars worth out of it.

I want to wait and decide on an in depth review on this one and others that I've read but if anyone wants to talk on them feel free.

[unluckytech]

They weren't even able to read it when they did have us do it

Reblog this if you had to learn cursive writing as a child

If you were ever told or were made to learn cursive writing when you were in grade school. I wanna see how many of you suffered like I did.

[unluckytech]

He wouldn't trust Peter to get neither distracted or bored

Peter giving a speech at Hook's wedding

Peter: Hook sure had a hard time finding a best man. First he added his coolest friend but he said no. Then he asked his funniest friend and he said no. Then he asked his best looking friend and he said no. Then he asked me and after turning him down three times already, I couldn't do it again.

[unluckytech]

I haven't finished the game and last month a friend was helping another beat the clocktower with paint so I'll have to look back on this

why do I keep seeing people say the thinner route is canon in Epic Mickey 1 cause,,,, it's not?????

The only boss Mickey canonically uses thinner to defeat is the clocktower and the blot doesn't really have a route (no matter if you use paint or thinner on the bloticles, it changes absolutely nothing). Besides bosses, the only other thinner path canon paths Mickey takes are letting Prescott destroy the telephone in Mickeys house and dropping the safe on Moody (there might be others).

All the "thinner path" options Mickey canonically takes (as proven by Epic Mickey graphic novel, novelization, and Epic Mickey 2) occur towards the beginning of Mickeys adventure in Wasteland, he learns and grows and realizes his actions have consequences

idk someone correct me if I'm wrong but he doesn't take the thinner path. Mickey canonically takes a more neutral path, using thinner some places and paint in others.

[unluckytech]

Reblog if you want one of these in your askbox:

A compliment or insult

A story

Why you follow me

If you met me what would you do

A cute message

One thing you want to tell me

One thing you want to know about me

[unluckytech]

Hi I noticed your post on having thoughts for a peter pan spooky type game and was curious if you still had any of your thoughts on it

i dooooo :) hi im glad you liked it . its been long enough now that who even cares about being secretive . as if i was going to make this an actual game. so ill put it under the cut. its just stream of consciousness stuff mostly so if it doesnt make sense erm sorry

the basic concept for the story is that you play as peter pan stuck in an orphanage on the mainland amongst cruel and apathetic adults and no way to get back to never never land, and trying to help the orphans around you while surviving a malicious evil entity that i haven’t fleshed out yet don’t worry about it. the fantasy world of never never land and your life as peter pan cuts through the story of peter banning at several points, with flying segments and pirates and mermaids and the like becoming representative of some of the grown ups you have to defeat 

the game opens with peter pan in never never land flying back to the hideout, coming back from an expedition trying to find the lost boys are missing even though they had been told to wait in the hideout for peter to return, and the first chapter of the game is peter finding each of the most boys hiding in various locations in the forest and bringing them back.

once they’re all collected he has them follow him to the highest peak on the island, where beyond it they find some kind of beautiful location like a meadow or some shit, a mirror ocean, idk man, and he sends them off to play beyond a prime and landmark i haven’t decided on yet (big tree?) though he doesn’t follow. slightly asks why and peter says he’s got something to take care of before he can join them so just have fun for a while and he’ll be back later, so slightly is like cool ok bye! and goes beyond the landmark . peter then leaves

it is then revealed that the lost boys were killed by the entity and that was peter leading their souls into heaven oops sorry! i’ll probably leave clues by where they’re found to indicate that they didn’t survive but anyways. peter then runs into hook and assumes that he killed them but hook says something ominous i haven’t decided on yet don’t worry about it, and things sort of ‘cut’ there into ‘reality’ and peter finds himself in like a london orphanage or wherever , implying that the never never land stuff was a fantasy he was having

anyways the game progresses like this cutting back into ‘fantasy’ segments for like symbolism and whatever else . there’s segments that reveal that the lost boys were actual boys that died in some way like neglect or something the evil adults did and peter tried to help them somehow (idk i’m picturing the idea that he broke into wherever the bodies were being held to try and give them death rites he made up to send them to heaven but he got caught and caused a hubbub that almost got the neglect revealed to the general public so he got punished. something to that effect)

but in the endgame there’s a Twist! turns out the never never land sections weren’t a fantasy peter was making up to cope with the horrible situation he’s in, the london sections were flashbacks to his life before he ran away and found never never land and decided to never grow up and become evil like the adults he’d been surrounded by before, memories that he repressed. the lost boys of never never land were just boys he’d picked up that reminded him of the orphanage boys that passed away, stuff like that

also twist reveal that hook was also someone from his past, but he was like. an educated man or some kind of officer or detective (or pirate still idk) tasked with finding the kid after he’d run away because of all the bad shit that happened to keep him from telling authorities, hook also forgot the past when he got to never never land and they started their rivalry but he remembered for some reason but like. he’s not gonna take peter back to london that sucks

also throwing around a concept for an entity behind all the boss fights and stuff , maybe something powered by evil that gets stronger through deeds of greed and whatall that’s been following peter around the whole game because of all his misfortune, that peter and hook have to defeat at the very end of the game

the very end is both peter and hook being like yeah, so let’s just stay here forever and keep the killing each other game going , or something. yaaay happyish ending :)

OH WAIT ACTUALLY i’ve got it. the game is framed as if the opening is just how peter conceptualizes and copes with the deaths of the real boys that the lost boys represent and the reason it switches back and forth is because retreating into a fantasy is how peter is able to accomplish all he needs to do or whatever. and then the reveal

[unluckytech]

Reblog if you think asexuality is a legitimate sexuality.

I'm trying to prove something.

[unluckytech]

THERE IS A NOVEL

GUYS!!!

I read the Epic Mickey novel!!!! It was so good! I loved it so much ❤❤❤❤

EDIT: Also if you want to read it, I found it on the Internet Archive. It's free. All you have to do is make an account and you get to read the whole book (as well as the graphic novel [which doesn't require an account to read] )

[unluckytech]

bring back tumblr ask culture let me. bother you with questions and statements

[unluckytech]

i can’t fucking take it anymore. welcome to my twisted cycle path mind