And If You Get Rid Of Every Depressed Scrawny British Boy Hopelessly In Love With His Best Friend, Who's

#24 on ur spotify wrapped describes how 2024 will go, how screwed r u

neal.fun

Absurd Trolley Problems

Every problem is the trolley problem.

This is so fun try it

The fruity four are the most unlikely clique at Rose Hill.

The au/crossover I never knew I wanted til I saw those pastel uniforms

i had the funniest dream before my young royals season 3 marathon the other day. i was at a concert and it was an omar concert which is kinda odd cus i don’t even really listen to his music much but the funniest part is he was just the opener.

the main act was usher.

obsessed with this letterboxd review for CHALLENGERS (2024) by rocky/WAYSTIAR

the funniest thing i have seen all day 💀💀

Malin, teaching Wilhelm how to drive: You see August and Marcus walking in the middle of the street. What do you hit?

Wille: Um… Well. I mean, I hate them both, so- Malin: The BRAKES. You hit the brakes!

Simon, eating a satsuma in the backseat: Hit the gas, Wille.

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 on 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 listed. 

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.

this like perfectly explains how i feel rn please read the whole thing

2024 is the year I have slowly lost my love and respect for Taylor Swift.

I love Taylor for her music and the person I thought she was and in a way I still love her, but in 2023-2024 it feels like the person who I thought I loved isn't the person who I thought she was. And I just began to lose my respect for her. Here are some examples of how I've lost my respect for Taylor as a person.

Not one word of support for Palestine. Not even wearing a Artists for Palestine pin. She went out of her way in speaking out against Trump and Blackburn, but she can't tweet or speak out ONE ounce of support for Palestine. Instead she entered her Football girlie for one of the most racist cultural appropriating football teams since the Washington Redskins during her Bread & Circus era.

And before anyone says "what about other artists" I direct you to this

Yes more artists should speak up, not just Taylor. Billie Eilish should speak up. Olivia Rodrigo should speak up, Miley Cyrus, Beyonce, Halsey, Lorde and more should speak up for Palestine. Taylor Swift is one of the biggest names in the industry, if not the biggest and one word from her and her thousands to millions and billions of fans will show their support for Palestine and demand a ceasefire. Like I don't know how else to explain how vital it is to use your voice as an artist and a huge platform as Taylor has.

She stopped speaking up for the LGBTQA+ community in 2021. She had all Pride month to speak up and could've used the Eras tour to speak up for us, especially in states that were heavily anti-trans and anti drag queen. But she didn't. Instead she propped up her precious racist Matty fucking Healy. She can have Trans performers in her music video and drag queens, but she can't speak up for them?

Taylor the climate criminal, need I say more?

Taylor the Billionaire. No one person should have this amount of money and it needs to be talked about more and honestly Taylor in 2024 is starting to feel like the female Elon Musk.

Questionable associations. David O'Russell. You can't tell me with a straight face that Taylor's team do not run background checks. Either they didn't do said checks or they did and Taylor did not care and would tarnish her image to work with a predator just for an Oscar. The Matty Healy fling. A brief fling and it was brief because everyone showed their complete disgust and contempt for it. Brittany and Jackson Mahomes friendship. Jackson is on video assaulting a woman. Taylor is a SA survivor. Brittany told the victim to "get over it" Taylor is shown high fiving Jackson, Taylor is shown for months with Brittany despite being a SA apologist and even having dinner with Brittany after the charges are dropped. Revolting. Taylor doesn't care about SA unless it's about her or how it can benefit her.

Continued silence on important issues when she said she would use her platform and voice. BLM? Nothing. Abortion/women's rights? Nothing. LGBTQA+ rights? Nothing. Palestine, absolutely nothing not even the bare minimum. The closest she'll get to using her platform is telling her fans to vote. Nothing but the bare minimum white feminist centrist rhetoric.

Ever since the countdown to Midnights and Midnights' release, the vibes I got from Taylor were not good. And something just felt off. 2023 and 2024 was just a mask off for Taylor and showing us who she really is and that she isn't who we thought she was.

And before anyone comes at me and says "Taylor is not an activist" yes, but she specifically made Miss Americana to tell her fans she would use her platform and voice to speak out more on important issues. She has done nothing. At this point I wish Miss Americana was never made, and I'm pretty sure Taylor wishes she never made it as many of her fans are disappointed in her silence throughout the years.

At best, Taylor is a coward. At worse, Taylor doesn't care beyond the glass house she has built her career on.

At this point all it feels like is she cares about the fame of her success and from her relationship with Travis and the profit of her brand and nothing else. Nothing about her is authentic, everything is performative. It's all about control and profit to Taylor Swift. It feels as though she's ostracized everyone in her audience who isn't white or heterosexual and made it clear we need to find a new guiding light and I think we should.

And in her own words she is telling us who she is

“i just think it’s so frilly and spineless of me to stand up here and say ‘happy pride month!!’ while people are coming for their necks.”

"My entire moral code is a need to be thought of as good"

" Spineless in my tomb of silence "

'I never had the courage of my convictions, as long as danger was near.'

"I've never heard silence quite this loud"" You should find another guiding light "

"You're on your own kid"

"Do something, babe, say something" (Say something)

"Lose something, babe, risk something" (You're losing me)

"Choose something, babe, I got nothing" (I got nothing)

Despite all this, I still love her and will continue reblogging gifsets, but I am done defending everything she does and intend to hold her accountable because when you love someone you just have to point out when they are wrong and just have to hold out hope they will be a better person, even if that hope is so very low.

jacks never had a bad track. “Glad to know you’re thinking about me when you kiss your husband.” BANGER. “But for tonight, let me pretend you’re mine.” ICONIC. “I’d probably kill another man if I found him with you like this” LIFE CHANGING. “There is nothing of equal value to me”. UNMATCHED.

because they all love and hate each other to varying degrees like patrick loves tennis and tashi and art but art the most and art loves tennis and patrick but he loves tashi the most and tashi loves tennis the most but none of them can have the thing they want most so they use one another to get closer to it and in the aftermath end up resenting each other for what could have been