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Latest Posts by foster-ya - Page 3
muss aber sagen, die angsty fanfictions zu diesem Ende schreiben sich geradezu von selber..
hurt/comfort natürlich auch 🤷♂️
n paar Gedanken zur neuen Spatort Folge
Dieser hetero Jumpscare am Anfang war auch echt unwaranted man.. ich mein ich find‘s super wenn wir mehr Freundschaft zwischen verschiedenen Geschlechtern sehen aber die Szenen sahen schon verdächtig nach Romance aus…
Ich saß echt die ganze Zeit nur da und dachte mir so ‘bitte nicht, bitte nicht’
Ich meine wirklich, ihr könnt doch nicht das allseits geliebte ship einfach mit Heterosexualität zerbomben so wie ihr das dann später mit Leo gemacht habt 😔
Bin echt froh, dass es dann doch so bei Freundschaft geblieben ist.
Aber mal ehrlich, ich dachte am Ende erstmal, dass die Bombe einfach nicht gezündet hat oder so.. hab dann erst an den Reaktionen erkannt, dass die immer noch in Gefahr sind
Oh und kleine Side Note: die böse Mom war hot, Punkt.
Reblog daily for health and prosperity
someone throws mysterious foam in your face
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.
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.
Large Photodump of my Durge
Istg I'm taking way too many photos of him, but I can't help it...
I tweaked his design a bit over the time and I'm now almost finished with Act 1 (finally)
For the ones that haven't seen my other post about him already, this is my first ever Durge character in BG3 called Li-Neer! He's a Lolth-sworn Drow Monk and romancing Astarion, Gale and probably also Halsin later on (polyamory mod, god bless)
Yes...I suppose his cambion form is quite attractive, but I will never stop being painfully horny for his human form specifically.
Astarion...babygirl. I love you so very much, but I rushed your personal quest just so I could see this absolute hunk.
Wurde neulich gegen meinen Willen auf ein Achtsamkeits- und Meditationsfestival gebracht, und kämpfte dort mit einer Fritz-Kola in der Hand um's Überleben.
"Mein Kumpel stellt da seine Master-Arbeit vor" erklärt mein Freund. Alright, klingt nach Pflichtveranstaltung, los geht's. Wir fahren zusammen auf eine Veranstaltung, die sich als besagtes Festival entpuppt. Irgendwo steht ein Gemeinschaftspingpongtisch herum. Leinenhosen und Birkenstocks scheinen der dresscode gewesen zu sein. Mir entgleist letztendlich kurz das Gesicht als mir jemand Club-Mate anbietet, woraufhin mein Freund sich zu mir umdreht und sagt: "Also... es tut mir leid". Ich starre ihn an. Er wedelt mit den Händen und fügt hinzu "Ich dachte nicht dass es so schlimm wird". Er meint bestimmt den Pingpongtisch.
Die Abschlussarbeit seines Kollegen ist ein Video-Dingens. Über Diskriminierung. Von trans Menschen. Wir setzen uns in die letzte Reihe. Der Silberrücken im mittleren Alter in der Reihe vor uns dreht sich zu uns um, mit den Worten "Oh, die Kleinen dürfen nach vorne!". "Hast du mich gerade klein genannt?" frage ich. Er lacht. "Ach, ich mein' doch nicht eure Größe!". Ich bin ehrlich verwirrt. Er dreht sich wieder um, und ist nach zwei Minuten während des Films eingeschlafen.
Nach der Vorstellung stellt mein Kumpelskumpel sich vor die Leinwand und beantwortet Fragen. "Ist das nicht alles viel zu negativ dargestellt?" fragt eine Frau in Batik-Sommerkleid. Ja, Veronika, das ist schon ziemlich negativ mit der Diskriminierung. Unerhört, dass man dir gerade das positive Weltbild massakriert. Sollen wir zusammen kurz 'ne Achtsamkeitsübung machen? Heilige scheiße.
"Da fehlt mir einfach der positive Ausblick" sagt sie. Veronika, ich kletter gleich über die Stuhlreihen und geb dir einen positiven Ausblick. Eine andere Zuschauerin meldet sich zu Wort. Graue Haare in walla-walla-Optik, Stirnband, Holzperlenkette. Scheint noch ein Original zu sein. "Also, das hatte für mich die Qualität von Wasser. Ich muss das erstmal sacken lassen. Das muss einziehen. Wie Wasser, ne?". Vielleicht sind Esoteriker doch ein Problem, entscheide ich spontan. Der Silberrücken schnarcht friedlich.
Die Fragerunde endet, wir gehen nach draußen. "Und? Was sagst du?" fragt mein Freund. "Ich will mich ja nicht lustig machen-" fange mich an, "Du lügst." sagt er. Alles in meinem Gesicht verkrampft schlagartig. "Möchtet ihr euch noch für den Meditationsworkshop eintragen?" fragt eine vorbeilaufende Dozentin. Ich sterbe.
One of the most beautiful and heartbreaking edits I've ever seen
Santa is on strike due to global warming. All presents this year will be delivered by Sasha the Christmas Tiger. Milk and cookies may not be sufficient.
i want that cookie sooo baadd
why have trans discourse when we could have trans intercourse
That’s exactly what I thought about his speech as well!
I mean, Jayce was literally straight up telling Viktor that he was always beautiful to him. With all of his different sides, problems and quirks. Including his disability. Differently than Viktor, I think it’s pretty clear that he never saw Viktor’s disability as anything that made him “lesser” than anyone else. Sure, he wanted to help Viktor “fix” his illness so he could like, LIVE. But he never wanted to turn Viktor into someone non-disabled, he didn’t see the need for it, because Viktor’s disability is simply a part of him, not a problem to “fix” and forget about. Jayce’s entire speech is pretty much a rejection of that the idea of perfection that Viktor seemingly carried with himself for years.
Pretty much “You don’t need to be perfect to be lovable, you don’t need to be perfect for me to love you. Because if you were perfect, you wouldn’t be YOU.”
I don’t often make my own posts, but I’ve been going a little insane about some of the posts I’ve been seeing about Jayce’s speech to Viktor in the finale.
So many people are like “um, Viktor had a terminal illness, how can Jayce tell him he was never broken??? He was DYING??”
And like, yeah. He was. But this isn’t Jayce ignoring that.
He’s acknowledging it by telling Viktor: You aren’t defined by your illness. You might have felt like you were lesser, or broken, or imperfect because of it, but I need you to know that you’re worth just as much as anyone else. And I understand everything you’ve done, because you’ve been hurting. And I love you anyway.
He’s not saying “your illness didn’t matter”. He’s saying “just because you were disabled doesn’t mean you’re worth less”.
I thought it was actually a really beautiful way of tackling the way that people who are disabled or chronically ill are viewed by others, or even by themselves: either defined entirely by their disability/illness, or considered lesser. Or how disabled/ill people are only allowed to be happy and inspirational messages that people can do anything, or they have to be sad figures incapable of anything and only deserving of pity. And this is Jayce saying no, that isn’t all you are. He’s showing Viktor that he sees all of the complexity, and the hurt, and he sees ALL of who Viktor is.
Anyway, I’m tired, and this isn’t all articulated perfectly, but I wanted to throw it out there.
Honest to god you guys, I didn’t really get the Powder/Jinx x Ekko (Timebomb is their ship name I believe?) shipping that much in the first season, just wasn’t really invested all that much.
But NOW, oh boy am I going through it now. Like, straight up bawling my eyes out and shit. The dancing scene with them in that semi fix-it universe FUCKED me UP fr fr.
Like I’m sitting on my bed rn, it’s almost 11pm and I’ve got work quite early tomorrow morning but instead of sleeping like I told myself I’d be doing (my sleep schedule is a bit fucked up at the moment), I’m over here! Sobbing like an idiot while listening to the song from the dancing scene (Ma Meilleure Ennemie by Stromae & Pomme). I can’t fucking deal with this. Leave it to Arcane to finally make me invested in the straight ship as much as the gay ones I guess. Doesn’t happen a lot but Arcane is just that good.
So yeah, that dancing scene was just beautiful on its own, but it’s just made so much worse by us all knowing that it’s just a different universe. That Ekko won’t stay here, that he’ll probably find a way to leave, to go back to his own. And in all of the scenes in the fix-it universe, we can see him slowly falling in love with Powder again, remembering who she was before everything went to shit, before Jinx. Seeing what could have been. What kind of life they could have had. The entire sequence of them dancing just has such a bittersweetness to it, it makes me so fucking emotional, it’s almost unreal.
So I guess, let’s just say: I get it now guys. Sorry for not seeing the vision before.
what if i was evil but we were so damn gay that all it takes to return me to your side is a montage of what we used to be
Like to charge, reblog to cast
I’m so sorry we didn’t learn, George.
Where's my Jewish phrase for when you people are being irrevocably horny?
I just got described as an "ad hating commie" by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff
