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Winding and Twisting Roads Drive Me Towards You Chapter I.VIII

Sneak peak:

“What are you doing?” She excitedly skipped over and saw the thirst trap edits playing on her phone.

“O. M. G! Are you watching thirst trap videos of me?” Wednesday slammed her laptop monitor down, but it didn’t stop the music playing in the background. While she was mostly calm, she chucked it at the corner to silent it.

“I’m not. It was Thing. He was doing research on your presence on social media and he came across it just now.”

Thing began rapidly signalling to Enid that this was all a lie and Wednesday had watched your thirst trap for the last thirty minutes. 

“Is Thing okay?” Enid could not understand Thing when he signed too fast.

“No, he is trying to dance. It’s the latest trend on Tik Tok I believe, but he is not pulling it off.” Wednesday shook her head.

“Got it. I was meaning to work on my social media presence. Come on, Thing. I have some obvious work to do.” She winked back at the clearly flustered Wednesday.

Once the door was closed, the music continued to play in the background of Wednesday’s office.

Sorry for the delay. Got distracted from politics stuff.

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PSA

Just a heads up, there are bots going around on AO3 accusing people of using AI. Considering the timing, this is likely AI bros' retaliation for AO3 users calling them out for scraping their work. Examples of what you might be sent:

Screenshots from here.

If you get a comment like this, just report for spam and delete.

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Thing is a Child of Divorce For A Week

Wrote this a while back and I finally sat down and said I'm going to humor y'all for a bit to compensate any pain that I shall invoke in Winding and Twisting Roads Drive Me Towards You Fic. Enjoy.

As the opposite pair pursued to argue, Thing hid behind one of Enid's collection of plushies. Thing always hated his “parents” fighting like this. While he may not have a heart, he still has feelings whether Wednesday acknowledges it or not. 

Suddenly Thing jumped out of his hiding spot causing all of the plushie to explode out by Enid’s horrid scream, “You have a stalker! And you just choose not to tell me or Thing about this?”

“Yes, I don’t see this as your problem, Enid. It’s really what you call a ‘me’ problem.”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/65116837

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NOTICE: As more and more fanfic writers are using generative AI for their works (you uncreative dweebs), I hereby swear on everything I hold dear that I have not and will NEVER use generative AI in ANY of my written work. Everything I post will be organically and creatively my own.

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Winding and Twisting Roads Drive Me Towards You Chapter I.VII is Out

Sneak Peak:

“...I have a fear of lightning storms.”

“You are kidding? You are a Formula One driver racing at 4 to 5 G-Force that can easily snap one’s neck apart. You do street racing with a car that clearly wouldn’t pass inspection that will blow up one day. You parachute for ‘fun’, and you are afraid of lightning storms.”

Enid rolled over to her side, now facing Wednesday. “Of course, you would find that ridiculous.”

“I do find that ridiculous, because I find you as someone who is one of the most courageous people I ever met. Why are you afraid of something so simple?”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/57775894/chapters/163858756

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Update on Winding and Twisting Roads Drive Me Towards You, you should expect a new chapter by this week. Sorry for the delay, I had to prove to my friends that I'm better than them at gaming and I had to outrank them once again. I needed to remind them that they can't beat me ever.

My fault. My competitiveness got the best of me.

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It's not coming off...

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Winding and Twisting Roads Drives Me Towards You Chapter I.VI

Happy New Years, everyone! I hope 2025 will treat you all well. That being said, I finally finished editing and here's the latest chapter.

Here's a short snippet:

“My. Our deadly scorpion was quite deathly accurate to describe you as a ball of sunshine and such a rambler.”

Enid’s face lit up like a bulb, “I didn’t know that Wednesday talks about me.”

“All the time. Every night, your name is somehow mentioned by her,  and she goes on and on about you. She desires to smother you in your sleep one day.”

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Home and Away written by @boojangs

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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.

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To all the fanfictions writers here, read this!

The site word-stream.com is posting fanfictions without the authors rights to make an AI voice read them or something. Some famous Wenclair ones are there. I just reposted a Tumblr post where someone explains with more details exactly what this shit is and how to take your fic down!

I can't believe so much shit is still happening 🥲 I hope it won't happen to your fanfictions. I don't know if it will change much, but you all should put your Ao3 fics to private so only registered users can read them... Hopefully the person stealing them doesn't have an account. Or maybe they do, but we can never be too careful

You can check this post for more details.

Take care!

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For those who are looking for an update, this month, there won't be any new chapters for Winding and Twisting Roads Leads Me to You. I had to take care of my health and my well-being first before I could write anything. So, I'm sorry for the delay. I'm still working on it slowly when I can.

I don't want to share my personal life on the internet, but for context, my health conditions was getting worse a couple weeks ago (I've been battling with it for several long months). I've been getting treatments and seeing multiple doctors. But, bc of my health conditions was worsening a couple weeks ago, I couldn't write. I was in a lot of physical pain and I couldn't write at all. So, I'm sorry for making you wait. I do hope you understand.

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Winding and Twisting Roads Drives Me Towards You Chapter I.V is out

Take a look at the snippet:

As Wednesday ate her dinner in complete silence, she witnessed Enid scarfing down like a starving barbarian. Her driver’s chin was covered with red salsa like a vampire just finished sucking its victim's blood.

“You eat like a wild animal, Sinclair. I can see why they call you the bloodthirsty wolf?” The wide startling blue eyes looked up to Wednesday and somehow swallowed the chunks without choking, “Oh god. You’re still trying to figure out that awful nickname of mine.”

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Here's a sneak peek on my next chapter (i may be depressed, but i'll always crack a joke).

---

“Hello, this is New Jersey Mental Asylum. How can I assist you today?”

The eldest Addams cleared her throat to be sure that the receptionist heard her correctly, “My name is Wednesday Addams. I’m a new patient and I need to check myself into your asylum.”

“Can you please state your reason?”

“Insanity. I have fallen in love with my” Wednesday gritted her teeth, “...friend.”

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DAY 2 - 4: blood, werewolf, rave'n all-in-one :PP

this time not inspired by any fanfic, just a silly comic by me

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Winding and Twisting Roads Drive Me Towards You Chapter I.IV is now out! Enjoy my Formula 1 Alternative Universe story.

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Chapter I.III for Winding and Twisting Roads Drives Me Towards You is now out. Also, I have a little surprise at the chapter's note at the bottom for you. Enjoy

https://archiveofourown.org/works/57775894/chapters/149006494