Latest Posts by thebog-witch - Page 3

so can we start hunting down white liberals now or what

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.

hello all my beautiful tortured angels how are we today

My wings are so damn heavy today. I can feel them practically pulling the skin on my damn back.

my place of employment (secondary) came out with these mugs that have “delulu” in a cutesy font and i was the only one to be like “hey this is…. not okay?”

Friendly reminder from a schizospec person that if you use the word delulu in any context ever I will beat you up on sight because that’s what ableists who make fun of me and my community deserve

yes, percy rose through the ranks of new rome disturbingly fast. no, jason did not do the same at camp half blood. yes, percy's rise to leadership at both camps took about two weeks and was completely unplanned. no, the same cannot be said for jason. his rise was carefully planned and took over a decade. they're both children of the big three, but where percy thrums with raw power, jason is a sword honed by zeus and hera. where percy is a survivor, jason is a weapon. where percy is a cycle breaker, jason can't get out. jason's fatal flaw was temptation to deliberate because he never managed to make his own choices. he was every classic definition of a hero rolled into one, and he never questioned it because his happiness came after the responsibility. jason was never going to ascend as fast as percy because jason was raised on hard work and discipline while percy, an abuse survivor and child of poverty, knew when to fight dirty. where jason was a transplant, percy was an invasive species. jason was always going to die because he was never more than a tool for the gods to throw away when he outlived his usefulness, or when he started to question his place. if someone as locked down as jason can question the system, anyone can. now that luke has put thoughts of overthrow in everyone's heads, zeus has to be very careful because while jason was expendable as his weapon, percy was unexpected in every way. zeus has no plan for him. when percy dies, he will become a martyr, so he can't die, except now everyone knows that percy doesn't want to be a god either. jason had to die, and now percy has to live.

The Harvest Haruspex & Wickerwax The Bat-O'-Lantern

Two new dolls going up for auction on my eBay this Friday! (25th Oct) The auction will begin at 21:00 GMT+1, and last for 3 days.

It's been years since I've auctioned anything, I'm a little nervous to dip my toes back into it 🎃 Good luck to anyone that might decide to take part! 🙏

https://www.ebay.ie/usr/slocotiondolls

I'm knitting in the corner at a party

and guys my age stop by to tell me I remind them of their aunt, of their grandmother. This is a compliment and I take it as such. They confess to having tried crochet once, and I smile. They get back in line for the bathroom.

I'm knitting in the corner at a party and a queer woman sits on the floor next to me, arranges her skirt, and smiles up at me. (I try not to blush.) She asks me all the questions on her mind about my craft and I answer them, hands still moving. We swap yarn sources. She doesn't stay, but she knows where to find me.

I'm knitting in the corner at a party and everyone knows where to find me when they need a minute, when socializing is too much and the music is too loud and they need to catch their breath. They pretend to be checking in on me, which is sweet, but I can see the relief in their eyes the moment they stop performing for a house full of people. They sit down and tell me things and all the while they never take their eyes off my hands.

The party has wound down and I'm still knitting and the hosts, two guys in their twenties, thank me for "helping to curate the vibe." I had no idea that's what I was doing. I leave the party having forgotten to drink anything and without that woman's number but with many rows added to my top-down raglan sweater. I call it a night, and a good one.

asked my cat if he wanted dinner or the slop that kills him and my twin was like "he can hear you, you know?" and when I looked down at my cat he was like this

there used to be so many stars in the sky that you would have to scrape away a dozen of them that splattered on your windshield every time you drove somewhere, but now they're being over-hunted to make american flag merchandise. very sad

Hey, can y’all rb this if it’s okay to send you messages asking about your ocs, cause on god I wanna interact with y’all but I am terrified of being annoying lol

The angel came to me in a fever hallucination, perched upon my bed as I returned from the bathroom.

the average twitter vs tumblr community experience

It’s that time of year to say no to the Salvation Army.

Never forget they let a Trans woman die instead of helping her.

Never forget they have tossed entire families on the street for having an LGBT child.

Never forget they tell non Christian families that unless they convert they will not help them.

Never forget that the Salvation Army is bigoted and hateful, many of the bell ringers routinely heckle and harass LGBT couples.

I want to be an evil wizard. but I keep choosing kindness

i don’t have a lot of followers here but wanted to boost this for my very best friend 🫶🏼 saturday’s art is fucking fantastic so consider yourself lucky to get a deal like this!!

Heeeeeeeeeey ^^ So, our car died, which means, until Ford comes to tow it, we haven't got any transportation! I need to get to work tomorrow so I can afford essentials, sooooooo

Emergency Sketch Commissions!! (3 Slots Open) (DM if interested)

Rules and Rates In My Carrd

You can find sketch examples on my card, under my "satssketchbook" tag! Thanks y'all :}<3

no i don’t have an “astigmatism” i can just see the halos of the angels that live in car head lights that you losers are too spiritually closed off to see

when I was a kid I thought the weather guy on TV controlled the weather and he was just telling us what he was gonna do for the next few days. when he said "30% chance of rain Thursday" I thought he was just guessing how likely it was he'd wake up in a rain mood that morning

"average cat owner spends 3 years in prison" factoid actualy just statistical error. average owner spends 0 years in prison. Miette's mother, who kicked her body like the football and went to jail for One Thousand Years is an outlier adn should not have been counted

using "what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament" to mean "yeah i made an embarrassing reference but you understood it which is also embarrassing" is very funny to me

“kill them with kindness” WRONG! nether dimension

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goth prep x goth jock be like

It's easy to want to spiral right now. I'm staring out the window, trying not to cry like I don't have to go to work and be normal in a bit. Which is why I wanna take a moment to remind everyone of a few things, from one scared person to another:

• Laws can't be overturned in a day. Our system of government, as corrupt as it's become, is still a system with the potential to reject the kinds of changes that would seek to hurt us.

• Please, please, PLEASE keep an eye on your local governments. It starts at county/state level before we ever get around to national-executive. Take a look at the way your state has been run, look into the policies of your representatives, and VOTE LOCAL when the opportunity arises. You're voice wasn't made completely void the moment that man got elected. Become active NOW.

• Utilize civil disobedience, go protest. There are so many issues on the table, a lot of shit we don't want happening. Cop City, Project 2025, the continuous subjection and genocide of those internationally such as Palestine, Susan, Congo, Tigrey. Look into local protests, become active, it's your right. Just please make sure you stay safe, be careful, listen to your organizers.

• Support each other. I want to make it so drastically, explicitly clear that COMMUNITY is one of the keystones of making it through troubling events like this. BIPOC, queer and trans people, women, allies, etc. Feel how you need to feel, be angry or cry or scream, fine. Of course. Just don't be alone.

See your friends irl, hug your family, go cry on a discord call, make memes with your mutuals, get involved with your local scenes. Whatever you need. There is a deep strength and courage you wield in compassion, in empathy. Wield that strength now for each other, please.

This is all deeply distressing and frightening, I know. Idk how to feel, idek what else to say. So, just know that we're going to get through this. Feel how you feel, but understand that defeat isn't really a luxury any of us can afford, so we'll simply have to live, persist, and do what we can. I love y'all, be safe.

☠ goulie-girl Follow

my vampire gf cant visit my crypt cuz they fucking buried me in a church cemetery fuck my entire unlife i wish i killed myself when i was alive

👻 creeps-and-crypts Follow

Hey. No. I killed myself when I was alive and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. You do not get to joke about that shit just because youre dead. Suicide jokes are never funny.

☠ goulie-girl Follow

its not a joke im serious. if i had just offed myself when i had the chance my grave wouldnt be holy ground and my girlfriend wouldnt literally burn when she enters my crypt.

🧛‍♂️ spike-through-the-heart Follow

oh if its holy ground thats the issue you just gotta figure out a way to desecrate it

☠ goulie-girl Follow

okay like how

🦇 unsound-familiar Follow

ill kill myself over ur grave if u want

☠ goulie-girl Follow

thanks but im not looking for a roomie

🧹 doubledoubletoilettrouble Follow

desecration potion

🧪 hexes-and-exes Follow

potion of desecration

🐸 wartsandall Follow

loOking for a poTion that deSecraTes? haVe I got the PotiOn for You 💋😋😜

☠ goulie-girl Follow

great the hexbots found my post

🧛‍♀️ i-bid-u-velcome Follow

babe just come over to my castle

☠ goulie-girl Follow

ur hellhound scares me

🦇 fagnsfangs Follow

i dont want to start anything but @castlecrypttt has had the same familiar for 20 years and i dont think she ever intends to turn it...

🧛‍♀️ castlecrypttt Follow

"i dont want to start anything" then why did you @ me you braindead fuck?? willie has been with my family for so long because its his choice. he doesnt even want to be a vampire he enjoys being a familiar. and we take care of him, we give him as many flies and spiders and rats as his little heart desires. all you snobbish vampires who look down on having familiars dont seem to realize that its not a one way relationship. he helps us with our vampire needs and in return we protect him and give him lives. he's going to live far longer than whatever his normal human lifespan wouldve been, 20 years is nothing. and hes part of the family. keep out of our business you clearly dont understand

🩸 bloody-bloody-marie Follow

oh my g*d i cant believe there are still vampires on this site defending keeping familiars.

🧛‍♂️ fresh-blood Follow

genuine question, whats wrong with having a familiar?

🩸 bloody-bloody-marie Follow

are you seriously asking me about the ethics of keeping an enthralled servant that you force into doing your bidding...

🦇 fagnsfangs Follow

op here, i think youre seriously misunderstanding the concept of familiars. a lot of humans would love to have the opportunity to become vampires in exchange for a few years of servitude. the issue lies in when the familiar is promised vampirism and yet never gets it. and no, vampires shouldnt be using thralls to get their familiar to do its job.

🕷 blood-is-the-life Follow

familiar here, and no. i dont really care about becoming a vampire. that was never in the deal i had with my master. but yeah, do agree thralls shouldnt be used unless the familiar is okay with it

🧛‍♂️ vampire-guy-steve Follow

if you dont want to become a vampire then whats the point of being a familiar?

🕷 blood-is-the-life Follow

well for me its a sex thing.