xiellesky

[xiellesky]

And they can also kick your ass, they just chose not to

my favorite frequently mischaracterized sunshines...

[xiellesky]

I started playing Cookie Run Kingdom because of all the Godly art produced by the fandom. Like wth they're cookies? Why are they scrumptious in a different way? Yall are so talented

[xiellesky]

Another chapter is here! Sakumo meets another war veteran that is shaped as a sassy feral child

[xiellesky]

Guess who's back!

Sup ppl, I am still alive, barely haha. I started posting fics again if that's something lol, oh and I also got a job now (tho I still feel like I'm still that sleep deprived college student) the adult life first step.

Shameless plug but here's the fic I updated Feral Children Often Make Great Ninjas. To summarize this fic succintly, it's that time Sakata Gintoki got reincarnated in Naruto and gets adopted by Hatake Sakumo as a feral war orphan child, queue fourth wall breaks, cracky shenanigans from the sassbucket child Gintoki and his very confused adopted father and everyone in general.

Also angst and found family

[xiellesky]

fuck yeaaahhhh

AO3 IS BACK UP!!!!!!!!

[xiellesky]

Man... you guys are heavy, dammit.

[xiellesky]

I just luv them

gin-chan trying his best

[xiellesky]

Zura is so right and I have no excuse other than depression

[xiellesky]

currently rewatching Gintama because I just need a reason to smile and laugh again. Aghhh... can't believe this series truly ended I miss it so much

[xiellesky]

I don't want to write fic that's "good", I want to write a fic that hits someone's id so hard it changes their brain chemistry.

[xiellesky]

I'M GRADUATING FROM THE STUDENT LIFE YEEE

I am so glad to share it to all of you that I'm graduating in college this Friday!

Gosh, just thinking about it makes me kinda nervous cuz that means I'm saying hello to a new journey in life. Let's just say an adult work life is waving at me and that means a more sparse writing time. I'll still continue writing tho, but I can't make sure about its frequency.

P.S. I'm a bit salty to our college management. I am viable for latin honors with my GPA (1.74, barely scraped to it tho) but because of a tiny technicality, it turned into an Academic Distinction instead. I am salty abt this bcs my parents could have gotten to the stage with me.

[xiellesky]

he's so pretty

He has a really pretty smile I can't help it

[xiellesky]

I forgot due to explosive bout of anger, but thank you echoekhi for informing me and reaching out for this whole shitfest. And please support Project Copy-Knight through this whole war. It's just unfair to us authors to get our work stolen for some buck. I've already filed for a DMCA to this crap but it's all a great waiting game for now

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[xiellesky]

My shit just got stolen by one of these bitches and now my motivation to continue writing is on the downlow for the bnha fandom. What the actual fuck is wrong with some people? I didn't even know that this shit would happen to a fic I wrote while managin my Anger Issues at 17, this just makes my blood boil at the audacity of some people. I wrote that shit for therapeutic release and now belief in people is going down the drain again. It might seem dramatic, but still that's my work right there that I wrote for fun and to share with everybody and then someone ups and uses it without even a single ounce of permission from Me.

Here's the fucking link of that vid my fic was used on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4RwZkci9pM and I sure as hell will be filing copyright claim on their ass

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[xiellesky]

[xiellesky]

TLATOAAC UPDATE

It took a long time but here's proof of my progress so far

Sorry about the slow going but at least we got here

[xiellesky]

TLATOAAC UPDATE

I am 1k+ words in Average Coward since today and might churn out a chapter soon. What do you guys want for the Alterverse Omake? Another random xover from another anime or an undocumented event that happened on Average Coward.

If it's a xover the choices are:

*Jujutsu Kaisen *BNHA *Lookism *Fairy Tail *Naruto *One Piece *Hitman Reborn *HxH *Who Made Me a Princess *One Punch Man *Ouran High School Host Club *Inuyasha *Harry Potter *Genshin Impact *Tokyo Revengers *Eyeshield 21