#~fic~

[degrassi-fanatic]

Asked You To Write It Down For Me

The anguished-kicked-puppy-dog-eyes Jamie was wearing were just becoming too much for Roy to handle. Every time Roy chanced a look at Jamie’s phone, he would see him staring longingly at a photograph of Georgie and Simon. Then, he would open his text threads to type, erase, and retype texts to Georgie only to shut off his screen at the last minute.

The cherry on top of this fuckin’ horrible sundae was when Roy found Jamie crying by himself in the living room the other day. Jamie never revealed the reason for the breakdown but, it doesn’t take a genius to see that he was feeling insanely guilty over missing Mother’s Day this year because of some brand deal shoot he couldn’t get out of. 

Roy had decided that enough was enough and rang up Georgie himself to tell her that he and Jamie were coming to Manchester for the weekend to have a belated Mother’s Day. 

The belated Mother’s Day, however, is still in the works as Jamie and Simon are currently running around shops to try and find the ingredients for some stellar meal they’re going to cook up for Georgie. 

With those two out, Roy is left in charge of entertaining her and he starts the evening off strong by pouring her a hefty glass of the fancy wine Roy helped Jamie pick out for her. 

“It’s always nice to have you and Jamie around.” Georgie says as she leans against the arm of the couch, her feet on the cushions, “It’s especially nice when you two bring posh wine.”

Roy snorts as he hands her the wine before making his way to sit down on the other end of the couch, facing her, with his own glass filled to the brim. 

“Well, Jamie has been missing you a lot, recently,” he says, leaving out the details to keep her from worrying, “He doesn’t like that he couldn’t make it for Mother’s Day.”

“I told that lad already that he shouldn’t worry.” she says exasperated, “It don’t matter to me when he comes down as long as he knows he’s always welcome.”

“Yeah, well, you know, Jamie.”

Georgie hums thoughtfully before taking a swig of the wine.

“This is good shit, my God,” she mumbles to herself before addressing Roy, “What about you? What did you get up to on Mother’s Day?”

Roy freezes. 

Usually, when people ask about his parents, he gives them the bare details or tells them to piss off, and seeing as he’s speaking to Jamie’s mother, he can’t exactly do either of those options. He doesn’t want Georgie to think that Roy’s some arsehole that’s going to be a bad influence on Jamie. 

Instead, he bides his time by swishing the wine around in his glass, being careful not to spill it. 

“My mum and I— We aren’t like you and Jamie.” Roy explains after a moment, “She and my dad, uh, they’re not really big parts of mine or Ruth’s life. I mean, they did fuck all when Ruth’s piece of shit husband left her and they didn’t even find the time to visit when Phoebe was born, and— I don’t know, they’re not bad people but, they’re not emotionally available.”

“Only person in my life that was, was my Grandad.” he says, smiling into the rim of his glass as he takes a sip in between words, “Then, he died while I was in Sunderland.”

“Jamie told me you went to Sunderland when you were only nine years old, right?” she asks.

He wants to ask if Jamie mentioned this when he was still a fanboy and it was some fun fuckin’ fact about him in a magazine or if he mentioned it to her when they started seeing each other. 

He holds off on it though. He’s not sure why. 

“Yeah,” he answers, “Sometimes, I look at Phoebe and I think about sending her off to fuckin’ Manchester for just the day and I have a heart attack. I don’t know how my parents could do that.”

I don’t know how my parents could do that to me. 

Georgie must be a fuckin’ mind-reader or some shit or maybe she could understand what he was implying because she reaches over to his side of the couch and places a comforting hand on his knee.

Much too quickly for his liking, she pulls off and recedes back to her side. 

“I remember the day that I sent Jamie off for the U-18,” she says as she reaches behind her and grabs a photo of Jamie from that time, the one where he’s grinning so hard at his mum behind the camera, “It broke me heart to do that. The only thing that kept me from flagging that bus down was knowing that he was safer than he was ever going to be here.”

Georgie places the photo back in its place delicately. 

Roy doesn’t comment on how she’s wiping away tears from her eyes.

It might be that moment of vulnerability that Georgie’s letting him witness or it might just be the wine he’s been going to town on that’s got him pissed enough to say this but, the next thing he knows, his mouth is opening and—

“It’s, uh, it’s nice being able to talk about these things,” he stammers, looking away when Georgie sends him a warm smile, “I’ve never really had that with a parent before. Not that I think of you as my mum or something because—”

Wordlessly, she cuts him off by plucking his wine glass and setting aside, along with her own. Then, she tugs Roy in by the wrist until he’s close enough for her to haul him into her arms. 

For a minute, he stays absolutely fuckin’ still, like maybe this is an illusion he can shatter by moving too much. Then, he decides fuck it, and fully leans in, reminiscent of the way he first saw Jamie and Georgie interact. 

“It’s okay, Roy,” she whispers as she tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, “I can have two sexy little babies.”

[just-french-me-up]

'ao3 needs a like and dislike button'

what you need, my algorithm-rotten minded friend, is a grip

[izzythedemigod]

I just found the funniest font ever

Like. What is this. Why is this. Who is the target audience of this?

[theaftersundown]

the holy grail types of fanfic

[minyicho]

starting a collection of my favourite AO3 author’s notes

honourable mentions

[heartbreakincident]

nothing but respect for our troops (smut writers) but listen. i dont want to be the person to tell you this, but not every character is going to be a dom or a sub. some people. and i know this is hard to hear. but some people do have vanilla sex. and some of those people might even be The Character.

[lislemons]

new favorite AO3 comment dropped. short, simple, to the point. made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt.

[tfatwsbarnes]

tower fics are so back baby

[themurdochmemesteries]

"i'm tired of seeing-" use your filters.

"but there was an icky ship-!" use your filters.

"i don't like that tag-" use your filters.

don't like what you're seeing? use. your. filters.

[roboticnebula]

Pros of re-reading your own fic

a good time;

Has exactly the tropes you like and the characterization you want to read;

Gratification: yes you did finish a thing and yes you did do good;

just a very fun time all around.

Cons of re-reading your own fic:

Is that another TYpO

[degrassi-fanatic]

Time, Wondrous Time

The first time Ted Lasso and Rebecca Welton meet is not in her office at Nelson Road in 2020.

No, the first time Ted Lasso and Rebecca Welton meet is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1991.

It had been his mother’s idea to go on the school trip. She had a love of travelling that Ted couldn’t wrap his head around and she wanted to share that with him so he could go and live out some of her dreams for her. 

At least, that’s what she said. 

Ted knows that the real reason that she sent him off to Amsterdam was to get him out of the house.

It’s funny. 

Before everything with his father went down, his mother used to scold him for running around town with his friends, begging him to just stay inside for one night. 

Now, she begs at his bedroom door every night for him to come down and eat dinner. 

It’s funny in the worst way possible. 

His mother had told him that she didn’t want him to miss out on any memories with his classmates and Ted didn’t have the heart to tell her that he didn’t care much about memories. In fact, these days, Ted doesn’t care much about anything anymore. 

That’s how he ends up in some museum having a staring contest with some damned sunflowers. 

“What did Van Gogh ever do to you?” he hears a British accent pipe up from behind him.

He turns to the source of the sound and finds a girl about his age dressed in a school uniform.

Her blonde hair is tied up in a neat ponytail with a couple of stray pieces framing her face. She’s so tall that he has to check that she isn’t wearing six-inch stilettos. She flashes him a smile and he can see the pink bands of her braces. 

His palms grow clammy and he wipes them on his slacks as sneakily as possible. 

“Uh…I...” he stammers, “Just don’t really get the appeal of sunflowers, there’s about a bajillion better flowers to choose from.”

She barks out a laugh.

“Is that your real accent?” 

His heart sinks.

He should’ve known better. How on Earth would a girl like her, who's probably from some expensive part of England, be into the whole Yankee Doodle situation he's got going on?

Ted simply nods before turning his attention back to Van Gogh and his damned sunflowers. 

“I like it.” she says warmly as she walks over to stand beside him, “Where’s it from?”

“Uh, Kansas.” he answers, “What about you? Where are you from?”

“Surrey.”

“Oh, I was just asking where you’re from.” he repeats as he faces her front on, enunciating a little bit more. 

She gives him an odd look. 

“Surrey… As in South East England.”

“Oh!” Ted exclaims, “I thought you were just saying sorry!”

She laughs loudly, breaking some silent rule or two in the museum as they garner the attention of other patrons. 

Ted pays them no mind as he stares at the way she throws her head back chuckling. He smiles when he hears her snort.  

“What’s your name?” he asks. 

“Becca Welton.”

He offers his hand and Becca accepts it, shaking it firmly like she’s probably been taught in those posh etiquette classes. 

“Theodore Lasso.” 

In the corner of the room, he sees girls dressed in the same uniform as Becca begin to make their way to an adult holding a clipboard. 

“Hey Becca, I think your class might be leaving.”

He points in the direction of the group. As soon as Becca makes eye contact with the group, they begin to motion her over urgently, tapping insistently at imaginary watches. 

“Oh, shit, thanks” she answers, “It was nice meeting you, Theodore.”

For a moment, Becca doesn’t make any move to leave despite her words indicating a goodbye. Instead, she stares at his face intensely. For a moment, Ted's worried he broke some cultural norm and Becca is going to sock him in the jaw for it. 

Then, she grabs a hold of both of his shoulders and reels him in to press a short kiss to his cheek. 

Becca backs away shortly after, burning bright red. She turns away without another word and rushes over to her class, her ponytail flicking back and forth as she goes.

Dazed, Ted brings a hand up to his cheek to feel the sticky imprint Becca’s lip gloss left. 

Maybe, Amsterdam wouldn’t be all bad. 

[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!

[frownyalfred]

the fact that I’ve actually had this happen multiple times when I’ve entered a new fandom is hilarious like what do you MEAN

[rafterdarkr]

why are all these modern aus for the Odyssey set in a high school. where's the retelling where Odysseus is just a guy lost in an airport who keeps missing his connecting flights home due to a comical series of delays and disgruntled airline employees

[bribun96]

AO3 has been scraped, once again.

As of the time of this post, AO3 has been scraped by yet another shady individual looking to make a quick buck off the backs of hardworking hobby writers. This Reddit post here has all the details and the most current information. In short, if your fic URL ends in a number between 1 and 63,200,000 (inclusive), AND is not archive locked, your fic has been scraped and added to this database.

I have been trying to hold off on archive locking my fics for as long as possible, and I've managed to get by unscathed up to now. Unfortunately, my luck has run out and I am archive locking all of my current and future stories. I'm sorry to my lovelies who read and comment without an account; I love you all. But I have to do what is best for me and my work. Thank you for your understanding.