Fallingfromheaven17 - Dannie's Random Blog

WARNING!!!!

People, please be careful. There are also people tracking children and people and putting bids on them based on their profile pictures on whatsapp, tracking and kidnapping them. Especially young children, so please be cautious, especially parents who have their children as their profile pictures.

Please pass this on to everyone so that they are aware of the danger. I don’t how it is all around the world but I know it can’t just be here so please please spread the word. Thank you.

Honestly the best part of being a barista was charging cops for their drinks. They're so used to getting free shit so it was SOOOOO good for them to pull up to the window and for me to be like "$6.47 :)" and them to make this whole elaborate display of slowly pulling their wallet out and handing their card over bc they weren't expecting to pay. I'd charge you double if I could, oink oink bitch

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 listed. 

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.

Source: fanpop.com

No excuse to cheat

Warnings: Slight angst, slight hurt/comfort, cheating boyfriend, arguing, break-up.

“You're an asshole!" You screamed at him. You were furious. You had just found out your boyfriend had cheated on you and now he was trying to give you weak excuses as if it made things okay.”

"Y/N, please. I'm sorry." He said.

You scoffed bitterly. "Oh, your sorry? So that makes everything okay, does it? No! It doesn't. You being sorry doesn't change the fact that you did it in the first place. In fact, I doubt your even sorry at all. Your just sorry you got caught. You know what? I'm sorry. I'm sorry I ever thought you were worth my attention in the first place."

"Y/N, I still love you. We can still be together," he pleaded desperately.

"Why....would I want a cheating scumbag like you? I think I'll pass thanks," you sneered in disgust. In all the anger and shouting, you hadn't noticed Castiel in the doorway, watching the scene intently. The Angel had heard you shouting and went to investigate. His eyes narrowed in anger at your boyfriend - or should you say ex boyfriend. There was no way in hell you were gonna take him back. Your boyfriend attempted to grab your wrist but you pulled away. "Ya know what the sad part is? I actually loved and trusted you and this is how you repay me?! By going behind my back and shagging some bimbo slut that probably couldn't find her way round anything even if she tried. No. I'm done with you." You turned to walk away but he grabbed you.

"Please, we can work this out."

"Why would I want to?" You snapped. "You betrayed me! You broke my trust and anything I held for you. It's men like you that cause the most pain to women. You claim to love em but at the end of the day, men like you seem to forget one thing. Cheating isn't an accident or a mistake. You don't slip and fall into another girl's fucking vagina! Getting the wrong thing from the shops is a mistake. Cheating is a choice, it's intentional. There is no if's or but's. You knew exactly what you were doing and how I'd feel if I found out and yet you did it anyway. If you loved someone then there's no way in hell you'd ever cheat on that person. Ever! Love is true and pure, it's being loyal, truthful and faithful. That's what love is. How the hell can you stand there and tell me you love me? Loving someone is how I loved you. I never once thought or ever considered doing to you what you've done to me. I don't need your fucking excuses! It's no excuse to cheat. Just get the hell out and stay the fuck away from me. We're done and I want nothing to do with you. Ever!"

This was the moment Castiel chose to reveal himself. He stepped forward, catching your attention. Your eyes widened. "Cas?"

Your boyfriend's eyes narrowed as he took in your expression then turned to look at the Angel. Castiel stopped beside you, his eyes soft and caring. Something your boyfriend didn't like. "Look, it was only for a few months, okay? It was just a bit of fun. Let's just go home."

Your jaw dropped. Was he serious? Not only did he cheat but he just expected you to forgive him and let it go like it was nothing and play happy families again. Well he can think again. "I'm not going anywhere with you. We don't have a home. That disappeared when you did what you did. You threw it all away for some trashy bitch. Now you can deal with the consequences. I meant what I said. We're done."

"I wouldn't be throwing anything away if you'd just get your ass home." He snapped. You lunged at him but Castiel held you back. You were fuming. How dare this bastard act as if he'd done nothing wrong! Although you didn't know it, Castiel was also furious. Furious at how your boyfriend was treating you. He was supposed to love and care for you but he wasn't. And he wasn't even remorseful about it. "Are you coming or not?" He asked impatiently.

"No, I'm not!" You snarled.

"Ya know, I wouldn't have had to cheat if you had just put out and given me what I wanted. It's your fault really," he stated, rolling his eyes.

That was it. You gave Castiel a dark look and he immediately let you go. Before your boyfriend could react, you were on him in seconds. The first punch broke his nose. The second hit landed on his eye. He would be sporting a black eye later but you didn't care. When he was unconscious and you were satisfied, you got up, breathing heavily. "Go to hell."

You walked away, leaving him on the floor. Castiel followed closely behind you. When you were far away enough, you broke down in tears. You fell into his arms when you felt his arms wrap around your waist from behind. "I'm sorry, Y/N. You didn't deserve that. I promise you'll find someone who will be loyal to you as you are to others and he'll look after you like you deserve," he vowed.

You shook your head sadly. "How would you know?"

"Because I already love you and I promise you I'll never hurt you. I'll wait a thousand years for you."

"I don't think you'll have to wait long."

U took the words right out of my mouth.

Requested by anon

I like it.

You know what, My dad had an amazing idea.

Every citizen should be given guns and we should get rid of the police forces, But keep sherrifs that we can elect. The sherrifs can choose deputies. If we don't like a sherrif, We get rid of them and vote a new one

Stephen: Tony look they named a burger after you

I hope Prince Charles drops dead the day before his coronation and they use the stupid fucking coronation money to pay for actually important things like. Y'know. Keeping their working class from starving and freezing