ksproject

[ksproject]

Julia Howarth, editor for The Communicator (a Star Trek fanzine/newsletter), 1975.

"There is a new baby in the family. His name is Randy. He is grey, with green teeth and a great carriage. He typed the entire COMMUNICATOR. He is my typewriter, which I up and bought with $20 that should have gone to the electric bill!" "[The Communicator] was assembled by literally cutting and pasting. Articles were cut out and glued on the pages. Artwork was also cut out and glued to the page. The titles and page numbers were hand written or calligraphed. Sources of artwork were fannish artists, prints of Star Trek film clips, TV Guides and newspapers, and photocopies of pictures from professional magazines. We then took the masters to one of the few copy shops available in the 1970s to print the pages. The magazine was hand folded and collated, then stapled with a tiny Swingline Cub stapler. This magazine was a very amateur labor of love."

[ksproject]

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.

[ksproject]

You know what's annoying.

When you go to a store and can't just get a cheesy resin ornament of your favourite characters as skeletons expressing love beyond death with a pile of skeleton tribbles at their feet

Happy Halloween!

[ksproject]

How are you going submissions wise? Are you guys going to contribute to it as well? More the merrier lol

Hi, we haven't had any more submissions since our last update about it. The two mods running this zine will contribute some of our own work, and we're happy to and would have anyway! But unfortunately it wouldn't be enough to launch a zine issue with just our work and what we have so far.

[ksproject]

WANTED!

Kirk, Spock or the Enterprise related art made for official clothing merchandise, or fan art printed on t-shirts...can you help?

Some examples from the archive:

'She Lives' is the t-shirt art created by June Huxtable for Gene Roddenberry's Lincoln Enterprises merchandise line. This is the original drawing. It has been on tour with us on exhibition at major UK cons. It would be great to find the t-shirt to go with it!

The depiction of a long-haired Spock was drawn by Maggie Symon and first printed on the back cover of the fanzine 'Book of Prophecy'. Here is an example of a used shirt (found on a con charity table!) and a NOS one (courtesy of Maggy Edwards of the Official Leonard Nimoy Fan Club). A great find!

[ksproject]

I wanted to share this essay from Star Trek Lives! because holy shit, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Not only is this insanely romantic, but it’s significant because Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy were very involved in the creation of this book. The authors worked closely with them (and other members of the orginal cast!) on multiple other projects as well, and Roddenberry even wrote the foreword of the book and endorsed it. That’s... wow.

Spock, the unlikely, unknown and lonely alien, is seen and known, understood and loved, in a way that few men ever have been, and he is learning to see and love as few men ever have.

[ksproject]

Me in a different uniform! :O

Lots of chat about many aspects of Star Trek: film making, costume, practical effects, art, fandom - including preserving the art of a cult phenomenon - and of course, acting; the process of conveying an iconic character...

And this, which is referenced a lot during the podcast:

[ksproject]

This is a shipwide announcement

Last year, I, along with the @ksproject, got to Destination: Trek with the help of Pam and Darren of Pam's Happy Hats. Pam is an amazingly talented crochet artist and friend to all Trekkies, Whovians and fandom geeks. If you've noticed me loitering with them at recent cons a lot it's because Pam's husband Darren is currently in hospital fighting leukaemia.

This amazing family needs the support of everyone, nerds, geeks, jedi, sith, starfleet, klingons - unite and buy crochet! Drop by www.pamshappyhats.com - and if you don't find your favourite you can request it...even your cosplay! That obscure character you've never found a figure of - Pam will make it!

FEEL FREE TO SHARE!

Facebook post HERE

*except you can't have the Enterprise, it needed a metal frame (that I made!) and took weeks!

You CAN have one of these, however; she does an entire range of Pride Daleks!

Or a mini or full-size Grogu! Mandalorian also available!

Or good Omens (Crowley also available!)

Or Supernatural!

And please, cast your spells, charms and goodwill into the universe for Darren (pictured here next to Tom Baker)

Kirk out

[ksproject]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Propstore (@prop_store)

If any project supporters have very deep pockets...this would be a fabulous piece of production art for the archive/museum!

[ksproject]

Wanted!

Doodles! Sketches! Little drawings! Sketchbooks! Old workbooks with Kirk and Spock adventures in the margins! That shoebox of scribbles from 5 years ago when you first watched trek! Or 10 years! Or 50!

Sometimes you see someone sharing drawings or sketches for a while, or find them from years ago on a dormant account, and think: whatever happened to those delightful doodles or wonderful watercolour illos? Do they still exist in a forgotten folder?

If you're wondering what to do with your old drawings, or are creating them now and have originals you'd like to see go to a good home, drop a line! They will be in very good company!

(Digital artists, don't feel left out. Prints or the digital 'original' is welcome; get in touch!)

The collection featured here is by @lejoursobre - technically, the largest number of original works by a single artist in the KS Project! :O

Stay tuned!

[ksproject]

Destination: Trek debrief in link above !

[ksproject]

Destination: Trek

I'd been asked to be involved in a UK Trek convention and thought this would be smooth sailing following LFCC, and that I'd be able to bring you similar and more of what I did there. I've tried my best to make this happen but much is outside my control. My explanatory post here explains some context. I'm very much in two minds over it all but know some will be hoping to see me / the KS Project archive in some capacity so if it's possible I'll be there

[ksproject]

Destination: Trek

I'd been asked to be involved in a UK Trek convention and thought this would be smooth sailing following LFCC, and that I'd be able to bring you similar and more of what I did there. I've tried my best to make this happen but much is outside my control. My explanatory post here explains some context. I'm very much in two minds over it all but know some will be hoping to see me / the KS Project archive in some capacity so if it's possible I'll be there

[ksproject]

Bent to put my shoes on the other day and think I pinched a nerve; sudden sharp pain and my lower back muscles went into spasm. Recovering/getting some tlc with friends...Pam (Pam's Happy Hats) made these to cheer me up 😅

[ksproject]

LFCC KS Project Museum booth video tour 2/2

>>>> 1/2

[ksproject]

LFCC KS Project Museum booth video tour 1/2

>>>> 2/2