rosyringd
<3
29 posts
Latest Posts by rosyringd
Happy plagueiversary
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.
!!PLEASE READ THIS!!
it’s really great to see how the community rallied together to get this au trending, but it had me thinking what else could they spread awareness about and get to the number one trending spot if they all tried.
I think that all of you could help spread these fundraisers more than I have been able to, share them to people who have the means to donate. I know this is an out of the blue and off topic post but I implore you to help. Winter is here, warm clothes will be expensive and it’s already absurd how much money people trapped in Gaza have to pay. I beg of you to help them, I wish I could do more for them than this but I can’t. I hope that maybe you can.
(Please note including those two panels [which were drawn by @kyri45] was done to grab your attention).
Links under cuts:
I will be making another post like this with other people's fundraisers later, please donate if you and if you are not able to then share it, I am BEGGING you.
isha arcane season 2 episode 6 moodboard
Lighting studies w/ Leshy Wanted to practice color and light using this lil' guy. Halfway through I decided to do season changes as well. If anyone is interested in seeing summer and winter I think I might just do it :)
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Cult of the lamb moodboard
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a normal crusade in darkwood
bonus timelapse
im cleaning out my desktop today, so here comes a lot of older artwork/comics i made months ago in art streams for trod stuff
anyway The Fox underestimates Narinder's hatred to play by other people's rules
Guys.
Guess what?
It’s officially…
HALLOWEEN!!!!
An unfinished line art drawing of my #Birdsofparadise oc (Vilaris) and Eobin chatting during a class
Robin just dropped some romance lore and Vilaris is just face palming internally
Please anybody if you can support this family in Palestine 🇵🇸🍉❤️
Please help us please 🥺🙏
i cannot BELIEVE the cops that shot and killed breonna taylor are getting away free while her boyfriend gets the blame. for acting in self defense of a perceived intruder. like a lot of gunowning americans would’ve done. this is such racist, dismissive bullshit
when she says she doesn’t send nudes
If you see this on your dashboard, reblog this, NO MATTER WHAT and all your dreams and wishes will come true.
did you know The Animation Guild is holding a rally tomorrow (8/10) in Burbank, CA and ANYONE is welcome to attend?? Come out and show support for our union ahead of contract negotiations!
Do you watch or enjoy animation? Wish shows would stop getting cancelled and shelved? Want to avoid having to look at AI slop? Think workers should earn a fair wage and have protections? Stand with us in solidarity!
We need YOUR support! Join #AnimationGuild members on 8/10 at 5 PM at IATSE Local 80 to show our strength before negotiations. Together, we can make a difference! 💪 Spread the word - everyone is welcome!
You'll never know how strong you are until strength is your only option."
From the heart of Gaza, these words become more true than ever. I am Bilal Abed Rabou, and I stand before you as a survivor of five wars, an academic student at Al-Azhar University and a software developer from the besieged Gaza Strip. I witnessed the devastating effects of these conditions firsthand
.
We were a family, living in peace, love and warmth. But everything changed when conflict and despair swept through our lives. Living in Gaza means confronting ongoing conflict, struggling against poverty and the lack of basic necessities to live. Life is very difficult, and even the simplest tasks seem impossible. Yet, despite all the chaos and pain, we remained grounded by the warmth of our love and the strength of our spirits.
Even six months ago, everything changed. Our once home turned into a mess and everything we cherished. Since then, we have been lost, clinging to a world of uncertainty and despair. We left our badly damaged home with only a few things. Since then, our lives have been threatened
with every passing minute.
But now, there is no longer a reason to stay in this place full of suffering, where we are deprived of even the most basic and important rights, education, security and peace.
Our hearts hurt because of all this injustice. We were willing to endure anything to keep our family together and provide comfort and care for our father in his time of need.
With each passing day, our despair grows and our burdens grow heavier. We need your help to break the cycle of suffering, rebuild our shattered dreams, pave the way to a better future, and reunite with our family. Your support is not just a lifeline; Rather, it is a beacon of hope in our darkest moments.
Here you will find our whole story
And here is the direct donation's link
Tired of y’all acting like Wukongs a manwhore when Macaque is RIGHT THERE. THIS GUY HAS HAD ROMANTIC/SEXUAL TENSION WITH ALMOST EVERY MALE ANTAGONIST + Wukong
ALSO not here for the Macaque=loser male wife agenda LOOK AT HIM. he is a moody alt man with trust issues who immediately has sexual tension with anyone he fights HE IS A BOP IM NOT OUT HERE FOR THIS “loser macaque” MISCHARACTERISATION THE MAN WEARS GUYLINER.
Today is 266 days, we are still alive. 🇵🇸🍉
Please don't skip! 🙏🏻🥺
Please consider sharing or donating, thank you! 🩷🍉
I just noticed this detail, but I think it’s rlly neat. Nezha has pointed ears
I know there’s tons of fanart depicting the celestials and demons with more pointed ears compared to the rounder ears of the humans in the show as well as other media that includes Nezha, but I didn’t realize that his design kept that feature in the LMK
‼️‼️LMK SESON 4 SPECIAL‼️‼️
THIS IS NOT A JOKE I WISH IT WAS BUT WE HAVE IT OH MY GOD
And people are already making English subtitles YAAAS
Ok so
When I said that it may be potential Spicynoodles
Well Redson Knew that MK had an ex it was something he let him know about
MK and Redson are both tired of Juan and honestly just want to get this mission over and don with already
Mk unfortunately has some lasting trauma from his past relationship with Juan and scared of being manipulated and used again
Redson is tired and irritated by Juan’s desperate attempts to break them up and despises him for how he treated MK in the past
Juan?Doesn’t care that MK doesn’t love him Yet and see Red as some demon who stole MK’s love from him
I have some backstory on MK and Juan Ling’s relationship
Juan was always a manipulative boyfriend and his favourite way of using MK was isolating from his friends and family.MK was very impressionable and he honestly believes that he just wanted alone time,he felt worse and worse and hated how he was always gaslighted into thinking he only need him
It took a year of this for MK to finally break up with him and asked to never see each other again.Obviously Juan tried stalking online and in real life but eventually he stopped
Juan though that MK was tricked by his friends into hating him and despises Redson now that he’s MK’s boyfriend and makes up every excuse to make MK think he’s a bad boyfriend
MK isn’t falling for his tricks anymore though as he’s happier and knows what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like.That not gonna stop Juan tho.OH NO.He’s gonna do everything in his royal power to make MK fall in love with I’m again
So I made an au called
Exes(original I know)
Basically,Mk and co(and Redson too)All are on some mission that monkey king sent them on.They’re going through this kingdom’s woods when they’re brought to the ruler on account of being suspicious(and travelling with demons I guess)
Now this would already be an inconvenience but then when they are brought to the king,MK Mei,Tang and Pigsy recognise the ruler as MK’s seethingly annoying ex.
The ex takes this as MK running back to them and embraces him(against MK’s will)but still has distaste against his friends because “They owe us some private time”
Sandy’s worried,Pigsy and Mei are ready to throw hands,Tang is desperately trying to figure out an escape plan while Red is just confused and irritated.