#Speechify

[ekingston]

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.

PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much!

[tacky-tramp]

An open letter to the Organization for Transformative Works' legal team:

Dear @transformativeworks Legal,

I am requesting that you take action on Speechify/WordStream's wholesale theft of non-commercial fanworks for commercial purposes.

As you are probably aware, Speechify, an app that uses AI voices to turn user-supplied text into audiobooks, has created a spinoff app called WordStream. WordStream has scraped many, many works of fanfiction from AO3, and has published AI-generated audiobooks of these fics. They charge users for access to these audiobooks, under a subscription model. Not only has this company, run by Cliff Weitzman, violated AO3 users' copyrights, it has done so for profit.

I understand that only authors themselves can file DMCA takedown notices when their fics are stolen. However, there are steps the OTW can take on this matter:

1. Notify all AO3 users via email that their work may have been stolen, and give them next steps. This is what companies are required to do in the event of a data breach, and that's effectively what this is.

2. Publish a blog post about WordStream's theft, and promote it on social media.

3. Send a letter to Speechify, educating them about fanfiction and copyright. Explain that fanfiction is *not* in the public domain, and therefore the users whose work they've stolen have legal recourse against them. Demand they take down all fanfiction they have stolen.

4. Reach out through your networks in tech and publishing to raise awareness of this and marshall support for a campaign to pressure Speechify to remove all fanfiction they posted without author permission.

I am a former OTW volunteer, and I would be happy to assist with any of this!

Thanks,

tacky_tramp

[luciantlux]

Hi all, if you don’t already know, Cliff Weizman, CEO of Speechify, illegally scraped works off the Ao3 without authors consent and uploaded them to his for-profit site, WordStream.

Please sign this petition to hold him accountable for his actions and get these works removed.

[sag-dab-sar]

Monetizing Accessibility

I wrote a review awhile ago for an app that I heavily relied on due to my dyslexia and TBI— Speechify. Its a text-to-speech reader that I can take photos of text books or signs and have them read to me. I used it plenty. You can take as many photos as you want, upload them, and have it read to you. Well..... thats what you used to be able to do. Then I updated the app and tah dah the main feature is behind a paywall!!! I can upload 3 files (photo/photoset) only! And if I want more I have to pay THIS fucking much:

So I updated my app review from 5 stars to 1

Then a long time later I got this email:

"One time discount" on something that was fucking free. Its the most basic feature. There were plenty of additional features to pay for and ads prior. Now the ENTIER goddamn app, including the absolute most basic function, above 3 files is behind a $140 paywall. I don't want 90% of the features just keeping files like I could before. Its not even a one time fee; its a subscription. As if my TBI and dyslexia only lasts a year. Not to mention I already deleted my entire library.

I fucking hate how goddamn expensive being disabled it is. The email is an insult.

[daemonologywrites]

With all the stories about data scraping fanworks for AI that have been coming out, I’ll be setting my works on ao3 to “registered users only”—not that I’m nearly enough of a popular writer to catch anyone’s intention, but I still feel uncomfortable with the idea of my works being fed into the plagiarism machine

[butterflywordsmith]

Was brought to my attention that Chapter 6 was so long it broke speechify. As proud as I am of the sheer volume of it, I want it to be as easy as possible for my dyslexic readers to enjoy fic without them breaking up the chapters multiple times for input. So, going forward I'm gonna pace things out into slightly shorter segments (perhaps 15-20k maximum cap per chapter) for the sake of accessibility. I didn't know about speechify but I think it's super cool that folks have other tools that help them enjoy fic. 🥺

[ekingston]

Unfortunately not. At least the lore.fm thing ended with an apology & a pledge not to do it again. WordStream & Speechify CEO Cliff Weitzman basically did a homer-hedge.gif and pretended nothing ever happened, while still holding on to the material he stole.

In a normal year, @flourish & I would have made a list of five big fandom trends for our annual "Year in Fandom" round-up. But the podcast is on hiatus, and I was left with MANY THOUGHTS about fanfiction seeming to break containment this year and nowhere to put them. So this is a "Year in Fandom" segment of sorts, about a set of related fanfiction trends that I'm pretty unhappy about!

I get that sense that a lot of fandom folks are, like me, worried about the way the ground seems to be shifting beneath us: in meta after meta, I’ve seen frustration over a larger but increasingly passive fic readership; dismay that traditional publishing has a growing influence over a practice that partly exists in opposition to it; and anger that some guy can just copy-paste your work and charge money for it, and no one outside of fandom seems to care.

What happens when fanfiction scales—but participatory fan communities do not? Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!

[healingwgabs]

Text-to-speech has been so life-changing :) School and reading in general were so much harder and even painful before

[ekingston]

STEAL THIS POST.

don’t just reblog but REPOST, rephrase, do your own research and run with it however you want. DM me to email you the high resolution images if you need them. just help spread the word.

more info & links here.

[theboywiththepurplesocks]

Can I get a sugar daddy or a rich friend who will buy me Speechify Premium so that I can escape my phones one and only default text to speech option when I'm trying to listen to a book on the Kindle app?

[gabby-i-guess]

Does anyone have speechify premium?

I need to renew mine and if I use someone's code we can both get like 25% off a year subscription. Pm me if you do!

[pawoooon]

I can have snoop dogg read my readings for me??

[ai-7team]

ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی: تحولی در دنیای محتوا

در دنیای امروز، با پیشرفت‌های روزافزون در زمینه هوش مصنوعی، یکی از جذاب‌ترین و کاربردی‌ترین امکانات این فناوری، ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی است. این تکنولوژی به ما امکان می‌دهد که محتوای ویدیویی را به زبان‌های مختلف ترجمه کنیم و به راحتی به مخاطبان جهانی دسترسی پیدا کنیم. در مقاله ی پیش رو، به بررسی جنبه‌های مختلف این تکنولوژی، نحوه کارکرد آن، ابزارهای موجود، مزایا و چالش‌های آن خواهیم پرداخت.

چرا ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی مهم است؟

با توجه به جهانی شدن و افزایش دسترسی به اینترنت، محتوای ویدیویی به یکی از محبوب‌ترین و مؤثرترین روش‌های ارتباطی تبدیل شده است. اما زبان می‌تواند یک مانع بزرگ باشد. ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی به ما این امکان را می‌دهد که این مانع را برطرف کنیم و محتوای خود را به زبان‌های مختلف ارائه دهیم.

مزایای ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی

سرعت بالا: یکی از بزرگترین مزایای استفاده از هوش مصنوعی در ترجمه ویدیو، سرعت بالای آن است. به‌طور متوسط، یک مترجم انسانی می‌تواند حدود ۳۰۰ تا ۵۰۰ کلمه در ساعت ترجمه کند، در حالی که ابزارهای هوش مصنوعی می‌توانند این کار را در چند دقیقه انجام دهند. دقت و کیفیت: با استفاده از الگوریتم‌های پیشرفته، این ابزارها می‌توانند ترجمه‌های دقیقی ارائه دهند که به خوبی با محتوای اصلی هماهنگ باشد. کاهش هزینه‌ها: به جای استخدام مترجم و گوینده، می‌توان از ابزارهای هوش مصنوعی استفاده کرد که هزینه کمتری دارند و در عین حال کیفیت مناسبی ارائه می‌دهند. دسترس‌پذیری جهانی: با ترجمه ویدیو به زبان‌های مختلف، می‌توان به مخاطبان بیشتری دسترسی پیدا کرد و محتوای خود را در سطح جهانی منتشر کرد.

نحوه کارکرد ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی

تکنولوژی ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی معمولاً از چند مرحله اصلی تشکیل شده است: تحلیل محتوا: ابزارهای هوش مصنوعی ابتدا محتوای ویدیویی را تحلیل می‌کنند. این شامل شناسایی گفتار، تشخیص صدا و استخراج متن از ویدیو است. ترجمه متن: پس از استخراج متن، این متن به زبان مقصد ترجمه می‌شود. این مرحله معمولاً با استفاده از الگوریتم‌های یادگیری ماشین انجام می‌شود که به آن‌ها اجازه می‌دهد تا ساختار جملات و معانی را در زبان‌های مختلف درک کنند. تولید صدا: در نهایت، صداهای مصنوعی تولید می‌شوند تا متن ترجمه شده را به صورت صوتی ارائه دهند. این مرحله معمولاً شامل همگام‌سازی حرکات لب و صدا با محتوای اصلی است.

ابزارهای موجود برای ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی

در حال حاضر، ابزارهای متعددی برای ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی در دسترس هستند که هر یک ویژگی‌های خاص خود را دارند. برخی از این ابزارها عبارتند از: ابزار Rask AI: این ابزار توانایی ترجمه ویدیوها به بیش از ۱۳۰ زبان را دارد و امکاناتی مانند تولید زیرنویس و ویرایش ویدیو را نیز ارائه می‌دهد. ابزار Speechify: این ابزار به کاربران این امکان را می‌دهد که ویدیوهای خود را به زبان‌های مختلف دوبله کنند و به سرعت به مخاطبان دسترسی پیدا کنند. ابزار HeyGen: این ابزار به کاربران این امکان را می‌دهد که ویدیوهای خود را به زبان‌های مختلف ترجمه کرده و حرکات لب را با صدا همگام‌سازی کنند.

چالش‌های ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی

با وجود مزایای فراوان، ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی چالش‌هایی نیز دارد: کیفیت ترجمه: هرچند که ابزارهای هوش مصنوعی روزبه‌روز در حال پیشرفت هستند، اما هنوز هم ممکن است در ترجمه برخی عبارات یا اصطلاحات خاص دچار خطا شوند. عدم درک فرهنگی: هوش مصنوعی نمی‌��واند به طور کامل درک فرهنگی و زمینه‌ای را که در زبان‌های مختلف وجود دارد، درک کند. این موضوع ممکن است منجر به ترجمه‌های نامناسب شود. نیاز به نظارت انسانی: در حالی که هوش مصنوعی می‌تواند به طور خودکار ویدیوها را ترجمه کند، نظارت انسانی همچنان برای اطمینان از کیفیت و دقت ترجمه ضروری است.

آینده ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی

با توجه به روند رو به رشد تکنولوژی‌های هوش مصنوعی، انتظار می‌رود که ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی در آینده بهبود یابد. این به معنای دقت بیشتر، سرعت بالاتر و قابلیت‌های بیشتر در زمینه ترجمه ویدیوها خواهد بود. همچنین، با توجه به افزایش تقاضا برای محتوای چند زبانه، این تکنولوژی به یکی از ابزارهای ضروری برای تولیدکنندگان محتوا تبدیل خواهد شد.

نتیجه‌گیری

در نهایت، ترجمه ویدیو با هوش مصنوعی یک ابزار قدرتمند است که می‌تواند به تولیدکنندگان محتوا کمک کند تا به مخاطبان جهانی دسترسی پیدا کنند و محتوای خود را به زبان‌های مختلف ارائه دهند. با وجود چالش‌ها و محدودیت‌ها، این تکنولوژی به سرعت در حال پیشرفت است و آینده‌ای روشن برای آن پیش‌بینی می‌شود. با استفاده از این ابزارها، می‌توانیم به راحتی مرزهای زبانی را پشت سر بگذاریم و محتوای خود را به یک جامعه جهانی منتقل کنیم. Read the full article

[redafi]

Hello, I have no idea if you still use Speechify as the posts in the tag were very old, but I would very strongly discourage you from continuing to use Speechify as a TTS tool, especially for fanfictions. The site uses generated images in its web design, it supports and provides celebrity voice deepfakes, and the summary of clauses 7.8 and 7.9 in their T&C as oof May 2023 is "Nothing you submit is private, we can use everything you submit for anything and everything we want, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it", which in combination with everything else strongly suggests data scraping. The T&Cs are difficult to find, but if you scroll all the way to the bottom on the non-landing pages you will be able to find it. Please reconsider using the tool if you still do!

not to worry, i got annoyed with all of the subscription stuff they added… a year and a half ago i think? So I don’t use it anymore—couldn’t even if I wanted to, because of the limits they added onto how many documents you could have stored. thank you for the tip though!

[triassictriserratops]

Hello, I strongly advise reconsidering supporting Speechify and recommending it to be used as a fanfiction reader. The site uses generated images in its web design, they support and provide celebrity voice deepfakes, and they retain the rights to use literally everything you submit for literally anything they want to and there's nothing anybody can do about it -- it's hidden in their T&Cs, which are not particularly easy to find, but it's clauses 7.8 and 7.9 that say this

Hi Anon,

Thank you for this major heads up! Removing my original post now!

Really appreciate this!

[plotpulse]

Speechify Review

Hey there, internet traveller! Let me tell you about this absolute game-changer called Speechify! 🎉  It’s not just your average app; it’s a revolutionary tool that’s about to transform the way you consume written content forever. You can turn any text, from articles to textbooks, into sweet, sweet audio format with just a tap. And the best part? You can listen to it anywhere, anytime! No more…