rosegrl18

[rosegrl18]

suck, and i cannot stress this enough, my cock to the fucking base

[rosegrl18]

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.

[rosegrl18]

Reblog if you’re over 20 and still read/write fan fiction.

I’m curious!

[rosegrl18]

hey trolls fandom !!

i wanna address some weird/worrying stuff going on on tumblr.. ’:-)

no one can control what anyone ships or what they enjoy, but sharing harmful and problematic ships on here is not necessary or okay.

its weird and possibly harmful.

heres why!!! ↴

i can't tell people what they can't draw, but i can ask of you to not put your problematic content on platforms like tumblr (under normal sfw tags).

put that stuff on a private twitter account or something.

it seem's people don't understand the harm that can be done by nonchalantly supporting problematic stuff; you are normalizing inappropriate and wrong relationships and situations. kids won't seperate fictional content from real life like you might, and the people who have unrestricted internet access these days are from gradually younger and younger generations.

you're exposing people to predatory relationships & especially incest, you showing that in a positive light is unimaginably harmful .... you're putting young people at risk, you risk causing kids to think that being in those situations is okay or that it's normal to support that kind of stuff. i know thats drastic, but it's very possible. and this doesn't just apply for the trolls fandom...

also on a wider note, proshippers are giving potential predators a ‘safe space’ by normalizing and promoting inappropriate relationships online.

please just be considerate, don't be gross, and don't be so shocked that something such as trolls has a very child based audience, its a KIDS movie. do your problematic stuff in private for the sake of young internet users and everyone else.

thank you for reading if you did, reblogs are very appreciated.

[rosegrl18]

So…found this on the Wiki (article is Bruce and Brandy’s children) and I just gotta say…I completely understand the part where Poppy becomes the aunt to one niece and twelve nephews through her marriage to their Uncle Branch. What I wanna know is how Viva becomes their aunt and how Peppy becomes their grandfather…am I missing something here?

[rosegrl18]

Would Clay be the father?

I knew you were gonna ask me that. To be honest, I don’t really see anyone else as the father, just because of her prior refusal to leave the village and because they’re close friends so it’s not really much of a stretch to think they couldn’t become something more. Long story short, yes, he would. More nephews/nieces for Branch and his bros (like they need anymore…)!

[rosegrl18]

Reblog if you’re over 20 and still read/write fan fiction.

I’m curious!

[rosegrl18]

The first drabble of my new “Trolls” project is up on AO3. My username on AO3 is IceRoseQueen.

I’m working on a brand new, “Trolls”-related, writing project full of short stories and/or drabbles which I’m going to post on AO3, so be on the lookout. My first short is almost completed and it’s very steamy, which all of them are going to be.

[rosegrl18]

Me tho…I mean, I didn’t really get a good look around the theater, but I’m pretty sure I was the only young-ish person there, without children, seeing Trolls 3. Everyone else in the theater were either parents with their kids or groups of moms with their kids that came together

Y'all this happened tonight they thought I was gonna see Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes cuz I was the only adult without kids watching Trolls Band Together 😭

[rosegrl18]

If you’d like a snippet of my first short, DM me.

I’m working on a brand new, “Trolls”-related, writing project full of short stories and/or drabbles which I’m going to post on AO3, so be on the lookout. My first short is almost completed and it’s very steamy, which all of them are going to be.

[rosegrl18]

I’m working on a brand new, “Trolls”-related, writing project full of short stories and/or drabbles which I’m going to post on AO3, so be on the lookout. My first short is almost completed and it’s very steamy, which all of them are going to be.

[rosegrl18]

With Floyd, Grandma Rosiepuff and at least one other brother knew he was LGBTQA+, even before he figured things out for himself.

22 days left!

We continue the countdown with:

Share your headcanons, any and all that you have for the Trolls franchise in a reblog or reply to this post!

[rosegrl18]

Also, if y’all are interested, I’ve also begun drafting a Cliva smut fic. It’s got plenty of good stuff, like a little bit of office sex, a little sex on a desk, and some other sexy stuff

Hear me out. With the new movie coming out, my brain has naturally produced fan fiction ideas and the one I really want to write is this: Branch is asked to babysit his nephews and niece while their parents have a date night. Things immediately start to go wrong, especially right after Bruce (Spruce) asks his dear baby brother. I already started writing.

Snippet is under a read more.

“We wanna go out on date night, but have no one to watch Junior and the others. You think you can watch the kids for us?”

“So, let me get this straight. You want me to watch all thirteen of your kids while you and your wife go who knows where and do who knows what.”

“Yes!”

“No.”

[rosegrl18]

Broppy, of course! Aren’t they so cute?

25 days left!

We continue the countdown with the question:

What is your favorite ship in the franchise?

Reblog or reply with the answer!

[rosegrl18]

“I wouldn’t be caught dead at your party, but you will be. Caught and dead.”

26 days left!

We continue the countdown with the question:

What is your favorite quote(s) from the Trolls franchise?

Reblog or Reply with the answer!

[rosegrl18]

Hear me out. With the new movie coming out, my brain has naturally produced fan fiction ideas and the one I really want to write is this: Branch is asked to babysit his nephews and niece while their parents have a date night. Things immediately start to go wrong, especially right after Bruce (Spruce) asks his dear baby brother. I already started writing.

Snippet is under a read more.

“We wanna go out on date night, but have no one to watch Junior and the others. You think you can watch the kids for us?”

“So, let me get this straight. You want me to watch all thirteen of your kids while you and your wife go who knows where and do who knows what.”

“Yes!”

“No.”

[rosegrl18]

Trolls Band Together Countdown Event!

Excited for the release of Trolls Band Together? I encourage fans of the movie to participate in a countdown event run on this blog starting on Wednesday October 18th, which would mark exactly 30 days to the release of the movie on November 17th!

All who are anticipating this movie are free to participate (reblog this post to spread the word if you do 😊) and each day will have a theme. Details will be below. Feel free to ask any questions you may have - and start thinking of your answers for when the time comes. This is meant to be a fun little thing for us fans! :D

[Text version below for those who can't view the image]

Oct 18th: Favorite Dreamworks Trilogy right now

Oct 19th: Favorite Character(s)

Oct 20th: Favorite Actor(s)/Actress(s)

Oct 21st: Favorite BroZone brother

Oct 22nd: Favorite quote(s)

Oct 23rd: Favorite Ship

Oct 24th: Favorite Original Song

Oct 25th: Favorite Cover Song

Oct 26th: Headcanons! Any and all!

Oct 27th: Share your OC!

Oct 28th: Fanfiction share

Oct 29th: Fanart share

Oct 30th: Somewhere you’d like to visit

Oct 31st: Cosplay

Nov 1st: Something you want to change

Nov 2nd: All Time Favorite Moment so Far

Nov 3rd: How did you first hear about this franchise?

Nov 4th: How old were you when the first movie first came out?

Nov 5th: Thoughts on the franchise as a whole right now

Nov 6th: Would you recommend this franchise?

Nov 7th: Thoughts on the TV shows

Nov 8th: Thoughts on the Holiday specials

Nov 9th: Thoughts on Trolls

Nov 10th: Thoughts on Trolls World Tour

Nov 11th: Thoughts on Trolls Band Together. Share theories if you have ‘em!

Nov 12th: Stuff you would like to happen in Trolls Band Together

Nov 13th: Future plans for the franchise?

Nov 14th: Hug Time!

Nov 15th: Free Day!

Nov 16th: Are you going opening day?

Nov 17th: TROLLS BAND TOGETHER IS OUT! GO! GO WATCH IT, GO!!!