Post Captain Marvel Identity Reveal Some Of The Other JL Members Try To Go Into Fawcett To Check On Billy

worldbuilding: the threequel

one | two

GCPD Officer: You’re under arrest for attempting to carry three people on a single motorcycle.

Jason: Damn, Bruce is gonna kill- wait, three?

GCPD Officer: yes, three.

Steph: oh shit

Tim: Cass fucking fell off!

Cass, somehow hanging off the back off the motorcycle by her fingers with ease: no I didn’t?

GCPD Officer, surprised: Jesus Christ!

Steph, shaking Jason’s shoulders: quickly! While he’s distracted!

Jason, speeding off with Cass still hanging off the motorcycle: shit, now we gotta pay Babs off so she doesn’t show Bruce the CCTV footage!

Tim: *falls off 2 minutes later*

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.

Zombieworld AU (1)

A/N: As promised! I'm not sure how many people saw the original bit of the game, but shoutout to @monachosis who was the first on interacting with this post!

No one expected Billy to survive, is the thing.

As one of the smaller kids on the street and with little strength to speak of, he'd never gotten to keep the nicer hideaway spots in the city.

He hadn't been able to stay in homeless shelters much either; They'd always ask why he was alone or they'd try and call social services on him.

His odds had been stark, laid out plain like that - small and weak and with no way to find a reliable place to eat or sleep.

Billy wouldn't have bet on himself either when the first wave hit.

But he does.

Survive that is.

Squished under a small pocket in a demolished building, a little lean-to he'd dug out for himself with his ratty backpack hugged to his chest and just about all his clothes on for warmth, he'd been too deep down, too difficult to reach, too insignificant a target when the whole world went to hell.

Billy remembers that first night in flashes. Remembers waking from his uncomfortable dozing to screeching tires and screams.

The bits of the sky he'd seen through the gaps between crumbling concrete and rebar had glowed a dull red, and there'd been an awful, thick stench of burning petrol in the air.

A car accident. He'd thought so simply at first.

But it had kept happening. Louder and louder and all over the place.

Desperate screaming and things breaking and this raw, savage sound in the background accompanying everything - Billy remembers that he'd thought of the dog he'd seen once, with rabies.

All slavering and thoughtless and violent to anything and everything that came close.

Just like that, but everywhere and instead of the way the dog had let him be when Billy had gotten far enough, whatever it was, was attacking everything.

Billy remembers shaking, hands clasped around his nose and mouth, with shallow vents between his fingers for air, lungs heaving rapid and shallow.

Had it been instinct, then? Something prey-like in his hindbrain telling him not to make a sound.

His heart gone rabbit-quick, slamming against his ribcage.

More and more screaming, people begging and a wet tearing all overlayed by that awful, awful savage sound filtered down to Billy.

His mind had gone blank.

How long he'd stayed like that, Billy hadn't known, but eventually the sky brightened - dull red fading to black then purples and then lightening to blue sky and Billy had stayed like that until the bits of the sky through the gaps stung to look at and everything was getting uncomfortably warm.

Billy remembers thinking later or trying to think anyway that he'd made the right choice, so to speak.

Getting out would have taken precious minutes and would have left his back to open air as he leveraged himself out.

Plus, he'd had no idea what was out there. He wouldn't have been able to help anyone.

Hiding had been his best bet.

Like a coward.

Billy had dug himself out of the building's remains, telling himself that and stepped out into a world completely changed.

I just came up with a really good idea for an angst filled Cassandra Cain fic but with how complicated it is it might be like 50k words or more and I’ve never even finished a fic let alone posted a fic before so it’s probably never going to happen.

Oh well, time to write a fic that will never see the light of day because of my perfectionism lol.

I’ve been thinking about the “turned into children” trope that we batfam enjoyers love, and one that I really like is the justice league turning into children. Bruce from before his parents died (see: a little piece of shit), Diana from before she learned about the outside world (see: really confused bc men??), Oliver at 15 (see: also little shit but for entirely different reasons) and so on and so forth… BUT then we have captain marvel who’s already technically a child, so I present you the idea:

Billy doesn’t turn into a child, and stays in his adult form. He has to take care of the league, because the world can’t know that they’re children (duh), but he’s having a really hard time seeing as he’s also a child. No one questions why he’s not a child, because you know, they’re not league yet. But once they’ve transformed back (they keep their memories), they start running tests (both magical and scientific) on him to find out why he it didn’t effect him, but find NOTHING. In the end they deem that maybe captain marvel is just immune to reverse aging spells.

And this is where I present to you yet ANOTHER idea:

One day one of them (whoever you like) sees billy transform and assumes he was hit with a reverse aging spell. Cue Billy having to dodge actually explaining how he’s a real child and why the reverse aging spell didn’t work on him

Loved one got top surgery yesterday so I made this for him but I think y’all would appreciate it too

I always forget that Superman has freeze breath or whatever it’s called.

So I’ll see a bit of fan media where he uses that power, and I’m just like, “Wtf??? Doesn’t he already have enough powers to begin with? You’re adding more???”

And then I remember and I spend the rest of the day embarrassed.

her ass is not listening

“We should give Billy Batson a gun” He should be given a kiss on the forehead and a warm glass of milk- the gun could then be discussed at a later date.