theultimawolfwalker
131 posts
Latest Posts by theultimawolfwalker
how does one learn how to do this? I'm genuinely curious
Context is important! Pole and sex work are inextricably linked, but there are distinctions between them. Strippers made this hobby what it is, and taught me what I know, and while I haven’t lived that life, I’m honoured to stand on their shoulders.
I hear Patreon has cool stuff
Sweet fuck guys, Viggo did not die for this
Like and reblog if you’re a true edger for the race
FUCK THAT WHORE
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.
PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.
Thank you all so much!
@the-actual-tc
please...let me and my amica out. we'll be good :pleading_face:
I AM LGBT AND I SUPPORT LGBT AND I DEFINITELY AM NOT HIDING A GROUP IF VELOCIRAPTORS IN MY BEDROOM CUPBOARD!!! *Leans on the door of my bedroom cupboard, dinosaur sounds coming from within* *whispers at the door* shhh be quiet or else they'll know
to piss off bigots
Very important question for my fellow rainbow people!!!
Why do queer people exist?
Wrong answers only, go!
mb chat they were annoying.
Alr which one of y'all was it?
PROOF IN CASE YOU NEED IT
UPDATE:
I put this in my reblogs but I’m going to attack this to the main post.
TRUMP HIMSELF DIDN’T CHEAT BUT SOMEONE DEFINITELY TAMPERED WITH THE ELECTION RESULTS.
^
Made by the amazing @the-gay-prometheus (genuinely thank you for saying this)
"what you desire matters not. you are mine now. from now on you shall be my executioner. you shall be my hand of death"
oh how i adore you skybound ulchtar starscream
babe. I know we’re all going thru a lot rn but I just wanna give u the heads up that sesame streets future is in jeopardy. hbo has chosen not to renew it for new episodes (a series that has been going since 1969) and the residents of 123 Sesame Street no longer have a home :(
Please call this recession the Trump Slump.
We need to put Trump's name on this.
*does it cutely*
biggest reason i make so many flop posts on here is because everything i do reeks of the desperation to make a popular tumblr post. this is deliberate, because it is what protects me from ACTUALLY making a popular tumblr post. so long as i crave it, tumblr fame will never find me. it is only when i turn away, and accept my fate of obscurity, that people will lay their eyes upon me. and it WILL be because i tripped and fell on my stupid face while i was turning
I raise you one better:
its raf and cody who gather bones
yeah miko does the rituals and shrines and stuff, but raf and cody supply the bones
raf Just Thinks Theyre Neat™️, and Cody has seen too much crime to not have a morbid fascination with finding out everything abt these dead animals
Miko at some point: Heck yea I got this strong screaming at the moon and eating dirt! -🐦
As someone who is a Celtic pagan and headcanons Miko as being a Hellenistic pagan who worships Artemis (Thanks Ratchet Fanclub chat) ....I can confirm that you can scream at the moon and eat dirt to get in favor with the gods and potentially get stronger. (please don’t really eat dirt that’s not an actual magic practice AFAIK and you’ll just get sick.)
On this note I also raise: Miko has animal bones she found while playing in the desert in her backpack. Bulkhead asks in horror why the hell she needs bones. And she just says “They’re for Artemis. Hopefully she’ll give me the power to kick Con ass.”
bro you just dunked a bunch of bears how could you they're gonna get ear infections
hey everyone its april fools. but dont worry i dont have anything planned. just going to sit here and...
I LIED !!!! GET PRANKED
POST BELOW ME GET FUCKING WET
i am terrified rn
i love it when italians argue about italian. like we don’t even know how our language really works we just roll with it
hello!
UNIQUE THERIANS/ALTERHUMANS CALL OUT POST !!!!!
Reblog/Comment with whatever your unique/niche theriotype or kintype is !!!
I wanna meet some new critters !!!
My unique one(s) are:
Slugcats + 2000's Webcore conceptkin !!!
caraxes!kin :)
UNIQUE THERIANS/ALTERHUMANS CALL OUT POST !!!!!
Reblog/Comment with whatever your unique/niche theriotype or kintype is !!!
I wanna meet some new critters !!!
My unique one(s) are:
Slugcats + 2000's Webcore conceptkin !!!
loving wolfwalkers is so vaild that movie made me cry
ikr??
Wolkwalkers was SOO awesome!!
The animation was so edible and tasty and WOLVESSS
I was wondering what the first Transformers .gif would be when I typed in “Soundwave”. No disappoint.
this is fucking real.
I will remove pieces of fuzz from your clothing, gemptly bite your cheek without using my teeth, nuzzle you and purr and coo after being separated for the unholy amount of time that is five minutes.
rb if your primary love language or one of your primary love languages is physical touch and has nothing to do with sex.
i mean physical touch like hand holding, picking the lint and hair off of each other’s clothing, hair ruffling, hugs, random high fives, etc.
aw, thank you!
People from this country are so cool
Throwback to the time I commented ‘I’m aro/ace’ under a YT video and all the comments on my comment were ‘those pronouns are fake. You damn liberals’ or something like that.
Reblog if your pronouns are also aroace
Edit: To all the people saying ‘I’m not sure if I can reblog this’ feel free to reblog if you support aroace people. You don’t have to be one!
we do be queer
part of the skittle squad, if you will
TRUE GAY FROG MATIERIAL
we make children like frogs them too :)
reblog if you think aros and aces (or anyone on the aroace spectrum) are queer
trying to prove something to my mother ^^
aro/aces are called both but also called divers in aro/ace only packs :>
A group of queers of all types is a pride
A group of aces is a deck
A group of aros is a quiver
A group of trans women is a code-camp
A group of enbies is a byte
A group of bi people is a tandem
A group of pan people is a panic
Thank you for coming to my wilderness documentary
PLEASE COLOR OUR FLAG
Edit because I think this is being misinterpreted: The aroace tag is not colored, it's a petition for Tumblr to color it (sorry for the confusion)
only ones im accepting now--an aroace
CONTROVERSIAL OPINION ABOUT BISEXUALITY
that purple in the middle is not the right saturation, it doesn't fit with the other two colors and it drives me crazy.
SAVE THE COONS
Fight AI and Protect Endangered Cozumel Raccoons!
Remaking this post with better info on how you can help the critically endangered Cozumel raccoon from your own home by BULLYING AI INTO SUBMISSION.
The issue: There is a critically endangered species of raccoon known as the Cozumel/pygmy raccoon. Among a shitload of other threats, the Cozumel raccoon also has to deal with the fact nobody knows it exists. This issue has gotten worse with Google's new "AI Search Overviews." Unfortunately, when people search things like "Mexican raccoons" or "What species of raccoons are in Mexico," all the results show coatis. Which are not raccoons (they are more closely related to Olingos.) Mexico actually has two species of raccoon, the common raccoon (Procyon lotor) and the Cozumel raccoon (Procyon pygmaeus.) If people can't even find the Cozumel raccoon on google without using the actual species name, how tf are folks supposed to know they are endangered and need help?
Anyway, here is a way you can fight back against Google's bullshit AI and search algorithms that are limiting pygmy raccoon conservation efforts:
Method 1: Report Incorrect Google AI Overview Results
1. Google phrases like “Mexican raccoons,” “what species of raccoon are in Mexico," "types of raccoons in Mexico," “what kind of raccoons live in Mexico," etc.
2. If coatis appear instead of actual raccoons in the Google AI Overview, scroll to the bottom and click the thumbs down.
3. Click “Report a problem”
4. Click “Not Factually Correct” or "Unhelpful."
5. Type something along the lines of: “Mexican raccoons are not coatis. The two raccoon species in Mexico are the common raccoon, Procyon lotor and the critically endangered pygmy raccoon/Cozumel raccoon (Procyon pygmaeus)” or "Bro, I searched for raccoons, this is a coati. Show me the raccoons."
6. Click “Include a screen capture” and submit.
Method 2: Report Individual Search Results
Find any search result that refer to coatis as Mexican raccoons
2. Click the three dots next to the listing.
3. Scroll right and click “Feedback.”
4. Select “Inaccurate content” or "Irrelevant content." Again, whatever floats your boat.
5. Explain the error by typing something like I mentioned above.
6. Click “Include screenshot.”
7. Submit your report.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR HELP!!!!
For more information about the pygmy raccoon and the threats they face, feel free to visit my site here! I still have a lot of work to do there, but that is where I will be posting updates about my research as well.
Also, if you are interested in learning more about how AI is impacting wildlife conservation issues, I actually have two youtube videos about the topic! How AI is Hurting Critically Endangered Mexican Raccoons (And How You Can Help)
You've Been Lied to About Canadian Marble Foxes