#sharing words

[deep-in-chicago]

Hey, I’m Rolan Deep. You can just call me Rolan. My pronouns are he/him (that’s important on this site, right?)

I’m 6’01”. I like reading, salads, and london fogs. I’m pretty work-focused, but my roommates are telling me to relax a bit on that front. I go for walks sometimes.

This is a mostly personal account, just so that I can keep up with people and all that. My roommate said it would help me with my emotions, and socializing as well.

I’m a lawyer who graduated in Chicago, IL. Feel free to contact me if you’re having legal troubles and need some help. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to back you up, but I will do the most that I am able to.

https://deep-in-chicago.straw.page

[ OOC ] Hey hey! The admin for this account is @ethossleepy :^) I won’t do much ooc posting, but when I do it’ll be tagged with “#out of character post” just so you know!

If you’re looking for more information on this au/blog universe, check out @4tlasb0und’s account! Or just check out the tag, “#shattering the veil” :^D

pfp by @zielaraaa !! Thank you so much and also thanks to Atlas for commissioning it!!

[abrighterspark]

i pick a moment

to freeze in time

to share in poems

and seal in rhyme

[mywasasi]

Hello! I have been tasked to do this since I've been asked the same thing!

List 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the askbox for the last 10 people who liked or reblogged something from you! Get to know your mutuals, followers and all the wonderful people on here!!!

Hi just saw this

1- Music

2- Art

3- Food

4- Reading

5- arting with music

[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!

[borderlineangel222]

and suddenly, again, I feel really tired, as if the world is draining me of everything i ever had

[iamanartichoke]

I don't know who needs to hear this, but as a creator -

I am fine with "the audience" -

downloading my fics

printing my fics

copy/pasting or screenshotting my fics

sharing your saved copy of my fics with anyone else who might want them in the unlikely but never impossible case that my fics are no longer available on ao3

making a book of my fic(s) and running your fingers across the pages while lovingly whispering my precioussss

doing these things with anything I create for fandom, such as meta, headcanons, au nonsense like 'texts from the brodinsons,' etc

I am not fine with "the audience"

doing any of the above with the purpose/intent of plagiarizing my work or passing it off as their own in any capacity

feeding my work into ai for any reason whatsoever

Save the fandom things. Preserve the fandom things. Respect the fandom things.

Enjoy the fandom things.

[morganbritton132]

Hopper is sitting in a booth at the diner.

He watching his new recruit talk on the pay phone outside through the window, contemplating. He’s not too sure about this Callahan kid.

He’s not sure if he’s just getting older or if it’s because he has a daughter now, but Christ. Callahan still had braces last year and they just handed him a gun. The kid is nineteen.

Hopper must have been too deep in his musing because he doesn’t notice Steve slide into the booth across from him until Steve is halfway through telling him that they make him sit at the bar when the diner is busy. He doesn’t like that because people touch his hair when they go past so, “Can I sit with you, please?”

He shoves Callahan’s half-finished hash browns to the side and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll be really quiet. You’ll forget that I’m here. Mama says I’m really good at that.”

Yeah. Somehow Hopper doesn’t think he’ll be forgetting much of anything. Especially after Patty Martin, the only waitress in the building today, comes over to top of Hopper’s coffee. She gives Steve the sweetest smile Hop has ever seen on her face and asks, “Pancakes again, kiddo?”

“No thanks,” Steve says, pulling some crumbled up dollars and a handful of coins from his pocket. He slides it towards her and says with a gap-toothed smile, “One big sundae with two bananas, please.”

She looks at the money, “That’s a bit more than what you got here, kid.”

“Not of it’s your birthday.”

This is a game, Hopper realizes when Patty asks, “Is it your birthday? You had a birthday last year.”

“I have a birthday every year!” Steve giggles, and Hopper is slightly amused until Patty leaves and Steve informs him, “Mama and me come here every year on my birthday and get a big sundae. We share it. It’s tradition. I’m seven.”

Hopper scans the room and finds it lacking, “Where is your mom?”

Steve pauses. He can see the gears turning in the kid’s head. He knows that Steve must’ve heard his dad say that you don’t lie to the police but you don’t got to tell them the truth because he predictably gives a non-answer, “She’s not here.”

Descriptive, Hopper thinks but he also thinks this whole scenario is so damn sad. Instead of an interrogating, he asks, “Hey, kid. How about after you finish your ice cream, I take you for a drive in the truck. You can turn the siren on.”

Steve gives him a look like he not only thinks that suggestion is stupid but that Hopper is too. He says gently, like he’s letting Hopper down easy, “No thanks.”

“I’m going to Tommy’s later,” Steve adds. “His mama is making me a cake.”

[night-orchids]

the fact that you can see the exact moment tears appear in his eyes

[petricorah]

thankfully, he didn't get it [id in alt]

[akanemnon]

Maybe they shouldn't have brought up Asriel... The aftermath

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[deep-in-chicago]

I accidentally cut my finger while preparing vegetables for a salad today.. it wasn't too deep of a cut, but now the tomatoes are covered in blood. Lost my appetite, but I'll probably be hungry later

[reverseteehee]

PLEASE SHARE! (I have attached the English and Spanish versions but MANY more languages are available at the attached link)

One way to support the undocumented community is by sharing resources, reminding individuals of their rights, and standing in solidarity with them. Here's one effective way to offer support: provide Know Your Rights cards to empower our communities.

You can print these cards for free! I am sharing a resource from the IRC, which can be downloaded and is available in multiple languages.

Let's work together to empower our communities!

Una forma de apoyar a la comunidad indocumentada es compartiendo recursos, recordándoles sus derechos y mostrándoles solidaridad. Aquí hay una manera efectiva de ofrecer apoyo: proporcionar tarjetas de "Conozca Sus Derechos" para empoderar a nuestras comunidades.

¡Estas tarjetas se pueden imprimir gratis! Estoy compartiendo un recurso de IRC, que se puede descargar y está disponible en varios idiomas.

¡Trabajemos juntos para empoderar a nuestras comunidades!

[eunnieboo]

i've been working on my next graphic novel! it'll be another sapphic romance. please look forward to it ❤️

[ekingston]

does anyone know wtf word-stream.com is or where to send them a takedown request? i just found a bunch of fics, including my own, hosted on this AI slop site—apparently offering what I assume are AI-generated audiobook versions & (equally AI-generated) ratings and reviews. i can’t take a closer look without signing up, which, no thank you, but it looks like they’re hosting the full fics and are peddling a paid subscription for the trouble of hosting them. can someone more knowledgeable than me explain what our options are in this situation?

[gallusgalluss]

CHIMERA: Creature of ART