There's This Trend I'm Calling "Over-corrective Fanon." Where You Have A Commonly Held Opinion In Fandom

I need a fic where Captain Marvel’s identity is found out and after a lot of arguing and debating, the Justice League is like “okay fine, you can be a hero as long as you have your parents’ permission”

And Billy homeless-orphan Batson, has to jump through hoops to convince all the adults that he has parents and they are fine with him being a hero

Fanfic writers PLEASE!!! I need Billy to have a situation like Tim drake when he had a fake uncle!

If THOSE TWO are working TOGETHER? Yeah, the world is ending, pack your shit

The scariest combo in the batfamily is Black Bat with Red Hood,I’m never changing my mind about this.

If I see RED HOOD and BLACK BAT walking towards me, I’m out. I’m turning my gps on,come get me cops.Please come pick me up Commissioner Gordon I’m scared- they are hunting me in a dark alley in which I can’t even see them and my soul is about to leave my body

Okay but who would be who??? I can see Steph as Cat Noir with her quips and her general vibe, but I can’t see Cass wearing Ladybug’s bright red costume cause she just embodies all black costumes so well…

Why are there not any StephCass Miraculous Ladybug Au's??? Why is this something I've never seen before?? Guys?? Just think about it, it would make so much sense!! Pls?? It came to me in a dream and I need someone to make my vision a reality. I am not okay over this, pls and thank you

Canonically we know that Cass pictures what Steph would tell her in those dire moments where she needs to make sense of her emotions

But what if she pictures Steph in those not-so-dire moments too. Like Steph is just the stopper in all her impulsive thoughts

Cass: *sniffs a bath bomb*

Cass: Ooh. Smells like cupcakes.

Steph's voice in her head: Don't.

Cass: *lifts it to her mouth*

Steph with a metaphorical spray bottle: No! Bad girl! Put that down!

Cass, pouting: Fine.

on her way to spoil your crimes (don't commit any)

nightwing | red hood | batgirl | red robin | robin | signal

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.

Mute billy

Wizard: “Say my name!” *closes eyes and raises hands*

Billy: *stares*

Wizard: *cracks one eye open* “Billy, say my name.”

Billy: *continues staring*

Wizard: “Billy??”

Somehow, The Wizard didn’t realize that throughout his entire speech about Billy becoming the Champion, Billy hadn’t said a word and just stared.

Wizard: “Billy… if you can speak, say my name-” *gets crushed by the stone thing*

And that’s how Billy went like a solid two weeks without transforming. By the end, he was teaming with magical energy so much so that he thought if he just moved to the wrong way, he’d explode. He knew you were supposed to say something, but since he couldn’t say anything, he had to find a way around it.

Billy: *walks into an alley and finds a piece of cardboard and scribbles the word Shazam on it*

Now, he was about to go back to the cave and see if he could just thrust the cardboard at the Wizard’s corpse and pray it will work. Unfortunately, it started raining halfway there.

Billy: *ducks into a different alley for a shortcut, and holds the cardboard above his head to block the rain*

Billy heard thunder, and then he was a grown ass man.

Zeus: ‘FINALLY! Sorry, kiddo, but I just took what I could get.’

Marvel: *confusion*

Solomon: ‘Billy, because you cannot speak, please just hold the cardboard above your head, so our friend- eh… colleague Zeus can see.’

And that’s how Billy gained the ability to transform. He went around being a hero and all that, he got to meet the Fawcett heroes and befriend them still.

Minute-Man: “Yeah, so I’ll take two scoops of chocolate.” *look to Marvel* “What do you want, big man?”

Marvel: *silence*

Minute-Man: *somehow understood his silence* “Right, and he’ll take a scoop of Rocky Road.”

They all developed a wordless understanding of the Cheese.

Then the bubble popped and Billy got to interact with people outside of the Fawcett heroes and Fawcitizens who were used to him being the big silent sunshine.

Marvel: *standing menacingly behind a Gothamite*

Gothamite: *slowly turns around, thinking they’re about to be bludgeoned to death by the next Bizarro*

Marvel: *points to their dog*

Gothamite: *now thinks their dog is about to be bludgeoned to death by the next Bizarro*

Marvel: *inches closer to the doggy*

Dog: *can sense its about to get pets and just loves it*

Gothamite: *confused as to why their dog isn’t literally whimpering in fear*

Marvel: *pets the doggy*

Gothamite: *confusion*

Marvel: *finishes, waves, and leaves*

or

JL: “Tell us who you are!”

Marvel: *just stares*

Spy Smasher: “His name is Captain Marvel, or Cap.”

Supes: “He couldn’t answer himself?”

Bulletman: “He can’t talk.”

Supes: “Oh.”

Batman: “That doesn’t answer who you all are. It’s not everyday a group of heroes just pops up-”

Spy Smasher: “SHUT THE HELL UP. We came before you kiddies!”

Marvel: *pats his shoulder looking at him like he’s crazy*

That was Billy’s way of saying “dude calm the hell down. Please.” Also, because Billy is mute, his face is extremely expressive. Marvel stared him into apologizing.

Spy Smasher: “I apologize for my outburst.”

last night i dreamt tumblr added like a billion buttons to the mobile app so instead of this

we got this

and everyone just rolled with it but sometimes the wide naruto got too wide and blocked off all the other buttons and people would just post "got naruto'd again :/" and the only way to reset him was to log out and log back in

I’d read that

so i was thinking about how bruce and ollie have the reputations of being the most dad-guys of the jla (although technically clark might have more than ollie depending on how you cut it) and i was thinking about doing of fic of them arguing over who should get custody of billy before roy decides fuck this and sweeps him up while they're distracted

i know this please help me