Lizzardman - Lizzardman

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.

since you guys liked him so much

Millie, everyone

LEAH SAVA JEFFRIES IS MY ANNABETH OKAY SHE ATE AND LEFT NO CRUMBS SHE IS THE ANNABETH CHASE AND EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG I DON’T MAKE THE RULES

im scared of episode 6.

episode 6 is the lotus hotel episode. and its rumoured to be the musical episode. WHICH MEANS it's going to be a masterpiece or horrible, probably no in between.

DP DC wip

Jason is holding the gun Danny’s in front but also flying behind? Idk maybe Danny got split into Danny Fenton and Danny phantom. Tim is the annoyed one in the second photo he hasn’t had enough coffee yet

Words from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

liam t crowley who interviewed a lot of the cast for the show and a bunch of pjo podcasts (SOME of which were at the premiere) tweeted out celebration stuff what the hell does this mean

hey everyone come look at some cool graphs about fandom

aka: welcome to a statistical breakdown of the top 100 fics by kudos in the Batman - All Media Types Tag on ao3.

aka: my vindication for why i genuinely believed danny phantom was part of the dcu

So! Starting off: How many kudos do the top 100 fics have? Altogether, they amount to 1,805,647 kudos.

How many kudos does the #1 fic have and did you notice anything weird about the data? Why yes! So the #1 most kudosed has 73,889 kudos. Which is SIGNIFICANTLY more than the fic in second place with 39,709 kudos. 34,180 more, to be exact. That difference is so insane I gotta admit I am curious if that stat is actually accurate or if perhaps something happened somewhere because the difference is. Astronomical. In comparison, the difference between fic #2 and fic #3 is 6,955 kudos, and the difference between #3 and #4 is 1,490 kudos. So perhaps you can see why I am just a tad suspicious. I'll admit, fic #1 is popular! I've read it before and I really liked it! But statistically- I have a lot of questions. A lot.

How many kudos does fic #100 have and what's the difference between fic #1 and #100? Fic #100 has 12,900, giving us a difference of 60,989 kudos between first and 100th place.

Now for everyone's favourite part: GRAPHS.

What's the breakdown of ratings in the top 100?

(legend: e=explicit, g=gen audiences, t=teen, nr=not rated, m=mature) To nobody's surprise, only one fic with an E rating makes it into the top 100 (E fics tend to have a narrower audience for various reasons, plus gen fics are BIG in batman fandom rn). To my surprise, T actually made up the majority of fics in the top 100. I'd predicted that it would be G fics on top, I'm guessing this difference between hypothesis and reality is because I did not account for people rating fics with profanity as T. Otherwise, this breakdown wasn't too surprising.

What're the warnings in the top 100 like?

(legend: CNTW=chose not to use archive warnings, GDV=graphic depictions of violence, N/A=no archive warnings apply, MCD=major character death) (could NOT make the graph label the little pink slice between CNTW N/A and GDV, so fyi that one is CNTW, GDV, MCD, and it has 1%.) Unsurprising: N/A makes up the majority. also only one MCD tag is present and Underage Sex and Rape/Non-Con are not present at all. Surprising: CNTW is second most popular! Also it is seen here being used in combination with other tags like MCD and GDV, which. Personally I didn't know you could do that. Makes sense though!

How many are complete fics?

(legend: y=yes, n=no) Most of them!

Hey everyone guess how many F/F fics are in the top 100

(legend= o=other, n/a=uncategorized, m/m=male/male relationship, m=multi, g=no romantic or sexual relationships) Zero!!! No M/F ships either i will say. Unsurprisingly for batman fandom, gen is the CLEAR winner here. Also unofficial survey based on my observations only -> some ships that were present include: Superbat, Timkon, Jaytim (and probably more but i desperately did NOT have to want to officially track this and add more data points to what is already a very crowded spreadsheet.)

How long are these works and how's that relate to kudos/hits?

(x axis= length, y axis= hits)

(x axis= length, y axis = kudos) So two big outliers here, one the work with 400000+ words, the other the work with all the kudos (and thereby hits) that was discussed earlier. But discarding those I think we can see from this graph that length is fairly irrelevant when it comes to how much interaction a work gets. From observations a lot of popular works fell within 1,200 - 5,000w category, and there was a weird lack of works in the 15,000-20,000w category. As in there was only one. It was a oddly noticeable absence.

Kudos/hit ratios!! I find these really interesting

(y axis = kudos/hit ratio) What is a kudos hit ratio? # of kudos divided by # of hits, equaling the percentage of hits that resulted in a kudos. Commonly lower on multichap fics, as people will click on them multiple times to read new chapters but can only leave kudos once. This is a stat that is probably meaningless and unimportant. But I find it interesting. So you all have to see it now.

When are these fics from ? aka: POSSIBLY THE MOST INTERESTING DATA SET YET!!!

(x axis = date in m/d/y format, y axis = kudos)

(x axis = date in m/d/y format, y axis = kudos) Available in both scatter and bar graphs! So with this I was curious if older fics would have more kudos cause they'd had more time to accuulate them. And I also wanted to know: Why do I (new-ish DCU fan) feel like the Batman fandom is so young considering it's about a media that's been around for 85 years? And here's my answer! Most of the top 100 was posted in the last 4 years! There are only 2 fics that are older than 8 years old!

This is SO INTERESTING to me. Why is this happening? In similar fandoms (Marvel), I regularly find works from 2012, 2014, etc, that are high in kudos. Hell, I just went and checked and 5/10 of the most kudosed fics in the Marvel tag are from pre 2016! What's going on with Batman-AMT? Just from casual engagement in fandom I'd been getting the sense that there was a big boom in the popularity of Batman on AO3 sometime relatively recently and this data really feels like confirmation.

I'll open this up to other fans: have you noticed this phenomenon? And if you were on Batman AO3 4-5 years ago - any insights? From the date alone I'd guess it's somehow pandemic related (sudden majorly stressful event caused mass desire for comfort like the type found in batfam gen fics, thereby launching the genre into previously unseen levels of popularity)? But idk! Tell me your thoughts! I'd love to unravel this!

Who's writing the top 100?

All in all, 68 authors make up the top 100. Shoutout to powerhouse @envysparkler, who makes up 11% of the top 100. Following that are TheResurrectionist and Just_here_for_a_laugh with 5% each, @unpretty and smilebackwards with 3% each, and foldingfacets, helenabertinellis, Ididloveyou_once, adelfie, Vamillepudding, Drag0nst0rm, AutumnHobbit, IzzyMRDB, Blueseabird2, and @motleyfam with 2% each.

AND NOW MY VINDICATION

In my previous stats post, I mis-grouped Danny Phantom as a DCU property because my experience in fandom had brought me to legitimately believe it was part of the DCU, especially as I'd never heard of it before or since. Well, with this graph, perhaps you can see why. Danny Phantom makes up 12% of the top 100. TWELVE. The only other crossover in the top 100, Spider-Man, makes up only 6%. Notable absences were Miraculous Ladybug and White Collar, which, while being very popular crossovers for DC and Batman, apparently didn't grab enough kudos to make the list.

So there you go!! Anyone have insights on anything discussed here? I'd really love to hear about it!

[All data collected from AO3 Nov. 29, 2024.]

You know when you have an idea, like a sparkle and you literally have to stop in the middle of the room to process what the hell was that. To catch this little sparkle and look at it but it's running away from you. In your head you're trying to find this sparkle again, looking for it everywhere, trying to remember how it looked like

But in reality you're just staring at nothing, standing in the middle of the room lol