Theft of Fanfiction Perpetrated by Cliff Weitzman, WordStream, Speechify

This article documents a currently unfolding situation within the fannish realm. Content may change quickly, and the page structure itself may undergo major revision. New details are very welcome.

Event
Event:
Participants:
Date(s):	December 2024
Type:	meta
Fandom:	Multifandom
URL:
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On December 22, 2024, fanfiction writer Easter Kingston discovered that Cliff Weitzman (Ofek Weitzman), CEO of Speechify, scraped thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website word-stream and the attached app.

He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. When the fandom community was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman first issued a non-apology on the original social media posts and then temporarily took down the website where the fanwork was listed.

When it came back up a few hours later, the fanfiction category was no longer listed, and individual fanfics were no longer accessible. They are, however, still viewable by users who signed up for a membership to the word-stream app and accessed the works before Weitzman hid them from view, indicating they remain on word-stream’s servers.

To date, Weitzman has not issued any sort of public admission that he did anything wrong, even though his actions went directly against AO3’s TOS, violated the affected authors’ copyright and broke fair use policy.

Fans, of course, are almost universally enraged.

The Discovery

An early exchange between Easter Kingston and another fan, tumblr user makicarn:

[ekingston]: does anyone know wtf word-stream.com is or where to send them a takedown request? i just found a bunch of fics, including my own, hosted on this AI slop site—apparently offering what I assume are AI-generated audiobook versions & (equally AI-generated) ratings and reviews. i can’t take a closer look without signing up, which, no thank you, but it looks like they’re hosting the full fics and are peddling a paid subscription for the trouble of hosting them. can someone more knowledgeable than me explain what our options are in this situation?

[makicarn]: Strange that someone with a legitimate company with a partnership with Brandon Sanderson would put their name behind a shady company stealing works from fanfic writers, but it may be worth reaching out to him on X.

Best case scenario is that someone has stolen the name for an app, but in that case, it would be good for him to know.

Otherwise, it would be good to start a dialogue about how authors can get their works taken down from this site!

It quickly became obvious that this was bigger than first realized. From a recap a few days later by J.D. Riley:

These days, things happen fast and it’s a good thing that they do…at least for fan writers. On December 22nd, 2024, Tumblr user ekingston (on reddit as “EasterKingston”) “noticed an influx in visitors” to her fic on Ao3 and was curious as to whence they came. For many of us, myself included, we wouldn’t even notice an “influx” as I have every single email notification or summary from Ao3 shut the hell off for the sake of my sanity. In her attempt to find the reason for this influx—something she never did find, by the way — she discovered, by accident, that some random website had scraped her wildly popular Supergirl fanfiction You & Me & Holiday Wine into a database where it was being monetized to someone else’s benefit as an audiobook read by Artificial Intelligence. With a bit more digging, Kingston found that this website and associated app were run by a man named Cliff Weitzman. So…who is Cliff Weitzman and, more importantly: who does he think he is to make money on other people’s content?

Similar Controversies

• Podfic and Last.fm (October 2010)
• Ebooks Tree (2015)
• AO3 App Wars (2020)
• AO3 & AI Generated Content (topic: scraping of AO3 for training AIs) (May 2023)
• Lore.fm (a text-to-speech app that advertised itself as "Audible for AO3" and was designed for use by fans to listen to audio versions of fanfiction) (May 2024)

Some Topics Discussed

• fandom and profit
• the long history of crooks like Cliff Weitzman, who are non-fannish tech opportunists stealing the creative works of fans to line their own pockets
• hypocritical marketing and disingenuous use of people with disabilities
• artificial intelligence being used, surprise! for nefarious and greedy purposes
• strategies for combating Weitzman (and similar thieves)
  • public shame
  • turning him over to corporate TPTB
  • commenting on his media space
• more

Keep It Civil!

From Easter Kingston, who discovered the thievery, a plea for no violent threats:

Hey folks, I doubt many people will see this message or the comment I left about it down below, but if you’re reblogging this post with death threats or calls for physical violence against this man, I am blocking you. I want this post to reach as many people as possible, and if you carry on like that you’re not just incriminating yourself, you’re giving tumblr reasons to nuke this entire recap. Thank you.

Going Forward

From Easter Kingston:

The issue we’re left with is that Weitzman is trying to make us quietly go away by publicly ignoring ever having done anything wrong, paving the way for the next tech bro with the bright idea to exploit (and thereby endanger the continued existence of) fanwork. Beyond a handful of responses to individual social media accounts excusing his actions, Cliff Weitzman hasn’t acknowledged that he did anything wrong when he took our work with the intent to make money off it, or admitted that he shouldn’t have fed them to AI in order to index/summarize/make covers for them. The only response he’s given the pushback on the platform formerly known as Twitter is blocking people who posted about the debacle, so I’m in favor of people simply not shutting up about what he did on said platform — and affecting his professional reputation and connections that way — until he properly, openly addresses it.

The Original Post of Discovery

On December 24, 2024, Easter Kingston, a fanfiction writer, posted on their Tumblr about what they had discovered: theft, piracy from fans' stories posted to Archive of Our Own.

There is a short version, and [a long version with a timeline, many more details and screenshots]; [archived link].

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.

AI Fuckery and Inaccurate Covers

AI cover art of Slow Show used on Speechify, erroneously showing it to be a het romance instead of slash. "(the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved)"

The app also used AI generated cover art that often did not reflect the nature of the fic's contents

[santamonicayachtclub]: Looked up the most popular (MLM) fic in my fandom and the cover is of a man and a woman lol.

[Easter Kingdom]: Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of that for my F/F fandom too. Those hideous covers are the only funny thing about this whole situation 💩

Fan Comments at Tumblr User ekingston

'Netflix of audiobooks' scrapes thousands of fanworks off ao3 without permission. Yours, likely, included, comment at Tumblr user ekingston (beginning Dec 22, 2024)

General Comments

[ekingston, original poster]: Cliff Weitzman has promised the listing of the works is merely a google cache issue and that they will be gone for good by December 31st. Of course he’s only communicated this to individual(s?) who wrote him to him directly & repeatedly, and never made any public statements about any wrongdoing. So I encourage everyone to help Cliff spread the word about what he did on social media ❤️

[rand0msmil3z]: Thank you so much for the comprehensive post — I noticed my fic was uploaded yesterday and it’s clearly available by google search today, although it seems to be hidden on the actual website. What a scummy thing for this cliff guy to do.

[the-lady-bryan]: After some cursory googling, there's 2 ways to go about link removal on Google on the web developer side of things. 1) use a removal tool and it typically gets taken care of within days. 2) delete the page and it will take WEEKS to naturally do it... Provided the content is ACTUALLY DELETED.

What this means is, unless he takes active part in the process, it will remain in Google search results longer than a week. Google will not naturally drop the index for a while and even then the actual page has to be deleted. If it still exists but has an auto redirect instead, say the link to Manacled redirects automatically to the homepage of word-stream, Google will not deindex the page because the page is still there.

[barnsburntdownnow]: here's the facebook page where i (silver9mm) got a reply from him directly and immediately got the email confirming fic removal https://www.facebook.com/cliffweitzman/

[clarasghosts]: every single time one of these sites pops up it's so stupid because podfics already exist!!! you can filter ao3 search results for podfics and get audio versions of fics made by people who genuinely loved those fics.

[devilwithabirddress]: one of the fic authors he scraped is also a podficcer who has done tremendous amounts of work to record her own stuff, and when she sent him a takedown and mentioned that audio versions already existed he replied "this is extremely rare and very commendable" ughhhhh

[radical-rad1986]: I would like to know the evidence that they were sock puppet accounts, please.

[garecc]: they're brand new reddit accounts made day of, that regurgitate cliff's talking points point for point

[ekingston, original poster]: @garecc Thanks! There’s still an undeleted one on the original tumblr post as well, a cut-and-paste of the Reddit comments under yet a different name, leading to a complete empty tumblr account.

The Hypocritical Accessibility Brag

[smallbeefchild]: It's so frustrating that he's doing this then claiming accessibility as a reason. Ao3 is really quite good on the accessibility front, and even if the basic skin can struggle with increased text size on mobile, there are skins that exist that sort out that problem. (@/ao3-skins here on tumblr has some good ones with easy to follow instructions on how to implement them. And there's a few good ones on Ao3 itself that have some lines of clothes you can copy/paste into a custom skin.) I heard pretty good things about ao3 and screenreaders. Not to mention all the podfics made by hard working talented podficcers, with permission from the original authors, giving credit to the original authors with links to the original works in the podfic on ao3. And they do a much better job than any AI generated voice and generative AI screen reader.

[toschestationed]: Yeah, it definitely annoys me that they’re using dyslexia as a justification for plagiarism, as if podfics and read-aloud accessibility functions didn’t exist. I’ve personally been using the read-aloud accessibility function on my phone to listen to fanfics for a while now, which takes zero generative AI trickery, to my knowledge, and is already built in to my iPhone, so I haven’t had to navigate away from AO3 or pay a third party for plagiarized fanworks in exchange for accessibility options that *already exist*, nor would I want to. Thanks for bringing visibility to this issue!

[motherlybitch]: Any claim they make about helping students with adhd or dyslexia are immediately contradicted by their scammy pricing. What a lame bid to try and make it seem like theyre actually trying to help people when they just want make money by literally stealing peoples writing.

[persepaien]: This pseudo concern for accessibility is by far the nastiest and most annoying wool genAI shills try to pull over people's eyes. Scummy fucks.

Which Fics Got Chosen

[the-lady-bryan]: Additional possible criteria: fics with hits over 50,000. Checking my stats on the one fic that got scraped against my second most popular, there is a out a 20k-25k difference between them, with the scraped fic sitting at just over 70k hits and the second highest hits sitting at around 47k hits. The second most popular has more kudos and bookmarks and outperforms the the other in all other ways (even word count), but NOT in the hits metric.

[ineffable-monster-romancer]: My fics are so shite they never get stolen 😒😭

Fanfiction and Profit

[pluto-murphy-writes]: also on top of plagiarism and his non-apology shit, if he's monetizing fan works someone is gonna get in huge legal trouble

[taphappy52]: is this not also extremely illegal even without the stealing of these works bc you can't sell fanfic?

[dracothelizard]: "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."

It's even worse than that, if you publish through Kindle Unlimited, Amazon requires that it is EXCLUSIVE to Kindle Unlimited. You can't also sell it via GooglePlay or the iStore, for example.

So by stealing KU exclusive works, this guy could ruin an indie author's career because suddenly the work isn't KU exclusive anymore.

Legalities, Lawsuits, Visibility

[narlth]: Wouldn’t it be great if we kept talking about how Cliff Weitzman is a thieving scumbag until that’s what appears when you google him…..

[starstruckbyacomet]: Just an idea, instead of work against this man yourselves, why don't fanfic writers report the man to the rightful owner of the characters, like: Warner Bros., DC Comics, etc. We are allowed to publish our fan fictions as long as we don't make money from them, otherwise it's a copyright violation. It's what happened to E.L. James, the writer of 50 Shades of Grey. 50 Shades used to be a fan fiction of Twilight which was available for free. Once she tried to gain revenue from it, the Twilight publisher threatened to sue her on copyright violation, so she changed the name of her characters and changed the title into 50 Shades of Grey.

starstruckbyacomet]: @darsynia We are legally allowed to use published characters as long as we don't make money from it. What we do is not a violation of copyright. Otherwise, Disney would be twice richer just by suing people left and right.

[darsynia]: @starstruckbyacomet Companies like Disney are free to conclude that if you hadn't been writing with their copyrighted characters in the first place, there would be nothing to steal for profit. It's easy to see how popping your own head up could put a target on it, that's all I'm saying.

[osaren2498]: Absolutely agree with @starstruckbyacomet. that's absolutely the kind of copyright infringement that big corporations would be all over. Bring it to their attention immediately and they'll have it taken care of easily. Though I can't say anything about the independent writers

[electronickingdomfox]: I don't know much about these issues. But if independent writers have a contract with a publishing house or Kindle, these companies probably have the exclusive rights to sell the work, in text and audiobook form, so it's possible they'd make a lawsuit against this thief too.

[bittersweetbark]: Ao3 not stepping in officially is kinda understandable but I'd like to repeat what I said in an earlier reblog: tgey scraped fics from Astolat. Maybe it would help to inform "big names" like her of this (maybe there's others). (Of course maybe they might not want to stir the shit at all. Who knows.) So I'm going to reblog this atting her handle again.

[natsu-kage]: There is the nuclear option of reporting word-stream.com to GoDaddy. As they are the registrar for the domain, they should be able to shut the domain down and he would need to prove he removed all of the infringing material from the site to get the domain reactive. Of course give him time but if it is not removed then drop this bomb.

[the-lady-bryan]: As the host, this would be possible. But GoDaddy is only the registrar. The host, as I discovered though filing a dmca through cloudflare, is OnDigitalOcean, which is known for hosting malware riddled and phishing apps and sites.

[ekingston, original poster]: It’s odd, because at least one person received a response from GoDaddy saying they didn’t host wordstream, but then another posted on the Reddit post today that they received a three-page email response from GoDaddy saying they’re investigating the matter. So for those wanting to file a claim with them, go right ahead!

[applesforthis]: Holy HELL what a douchebag. Thx for the summary. I’m intrigued by @starstruckbyacomet’s idea to sic copyright owners on him if he tries to pull this shit again. I’m not a lawyer but that does seem like the sort of thing the owners would care about.

[quezycoatl]: I thought the reason AO3 was a nonprofit was because profiting from transformative works is extremely illegal? Why don't we tell the copyright holders about the situation and have them sue him into the ground?

[lordjeanliness]: Because the less that the legality of fan works is tested in courts, the better for everyone involved.

[insatiablytaken]: This may be worth bringing up to Brandon Sanderson's PR team as he has heavily endorsed speechify and as of his convention a week or so ago had the speecify ceo play a major character role (Kaladin) during his convention. As Sanderson is well known for fighting Audible for better conditions for Indie authors, this will likely very much be of interest to him if for nothing more than massive damage control.

[dewdropdaffodil]: What a perfect set up for a class action lawsuit. It is an open and shut win, so I bet we could find a bunch of lawyers to take the case - just let them keep the money he has to pay out.

[themangledsans0508]: Question for anyone: should we still file a DMCA if we don't know our fics are on there? We have no way to check for us folks just finding out now, what should we do?

[ekingston, original poster]: I just added in my latest reblog and in the comment above that there still is a way to check through googling your work title + username + wordstream. Someone appears to have had some luck filing a copyright claim through GoDaddy, who say they’re investigating. Take any action you feel you need to!

[marlynnofmany]: Can't we simply notify a few of the biggest copyright holders, and sic their lawyers on this guy? The whole point in not monetizing fanworks in the first place was because you could get sued into oblivion for it. If anybody deserves that, it's this guy who's stolen other people's stuff twice over.

[lordjeanliness]: You can still get sued for UN-monetized fan works, it's just somewhat likely that they wouldn't win. We don't actually want big corps to spend more time testing the courts' willingness or unwillingness to consider fanworks as exempt from copyright law. The more this stuff ends up in court, period, the more likely that there will be case law restricting fan activity. Fan works aren't legal per se, they're just somewhat less illegal than other forms of copyright infringement.

[dragonimpal67]: Any chance we could get someone to make a bit of 'poison' code for fic the way they did to try and prevent AI from stealing digital art?

[jeptwin]: I think it’s important to remember that they DO understand how powerful fanfiction is on the internet, and how useful it can be. I think it’s also important to remember that WE can use intellectual property laws to perform a class action suit if necessary, because they’re counting on the narrative they’ve crafted that it’s shameful to write or read fanfiction to keep us quiet

[holo-wench]: I hope his arse gets sued into oblivion

The Villain

[guilloteenage-wasteland]: [...] Cliff is a bully and a coward and should be approached and dealt with as the sketchy, disorganized, and entitled liar he is. Assume no benign intent.

[mocrlbmutwwwptth]: It will never not be amazing to me how disrespectful and contemptuous some wealthy douchebags can be to the very people that they would be absolutely PENNILESS without.

[dawn295]: These are sad times, when fanfic writers and even authors have to scrape around to make a living or to enjoy their hobbies and someone comes and takes it all, feeding it to an AI. I hope this is not the start of the end for the fandoms (and writers in general).

[evergray07]: I always thought speechify is shady. But i didn't expected it to be this shady

[thranduilpcsp]: feeding it to an AI sounds like feeding a monster.

[lilamal]: Absolutely despicable

[hatlesshatter]: I'm going to start biting. I'm so mad.

This Has Happened Before

[gravityglitch-blog]: Wtf, I wasn't aware of any of this! I'm getting so sick of data-scrapers invading fandom spaces. I wish we could just fumigate everywhere for AI thievery, like how you spray a house for dangerous pests😡

[jackalwolfsoul]: ... I do not have an Archive of our Own account, I get the anger about all this. Had this happened on WattPad a couple of years back. One of the authors I was helping by supporting her work was stolen by a mirror website. I sent her a DM back when you can still do that on WattPad and told her what I found. She asked me to snoop around for her and let her know which of her books were on the mirror website. Sadly, it was all of them. So I told her, and she did what she needed to get done to take her works down from the mirror website.

Some Screenshots Embedded

• 

  what a plagerized link looked like

• 

  the second, revised message from Weitzman in response to Kingston’s tumblr post

Fan Comments at Reddit by EasterKingston

From So your fic was stolen & then quickly hidden from view by Speechify CEO: update & full recap regarding the word-stream situation by EasterKingston (Reddit) (Dec 25, 2024)

NOTE: EasterKingston and ekingston are the same person.

General

[SarkastiCat]: Just in case, there was another sock puppet account defending WordStream.

To keep long story short term, they basically went on all about how the company just tried to make an accessibility tool, how WordStream is good, how fanfic writers should be happy, etc.

Just lots of sugary sprinkles on the pile of rotten trash and hiding behind „accessibility”, my sass.

It’s just disgusting to see people trying to make profit from vulnerable groups by using them as meat shields and hiding inaccessibility traps (the whole subscription screen that pops up right after creating an account). Also, by potentially using their works without permission and putting them in legal troubles

[Magnafeana]: I’ll do my part to spread awareness soon on Tumbr, but thank you for the comprehensive breakdown, OP! And thank you for being loud about this. Please have my free award!

I will continue to say fuck genAI and AI scrappers. It doesn’t call for any sort of death threats. But it is a call for action and awareness on how abused generative AI and AI scrappers can be and how unethical and frankly how fucking gross.

ACAB. All CEOs are Bad.

🎵Fandom! We get the job done!😤🎵

[TrisarA]: this brings to mind Captain Picard's speech at the end of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Drumhead, about how vigilance is the price we must all pay for our freedoms. Sometimes that freedom is just the freedom to be able to write about your blorbos and not have them stolen by a jackass trying to turn a quick buck off of them.

[wizardsfrolikgardens]: I'm tired of this shit, man. I hate how fanfiction has gotten mainstream. Leave us alone. This is the ONE hobby that isn't monitored to high heaven (because it flat out can't be) but you have scummy fucks like this trying to worm their way in, not understanding (or i guess intentionally misunderstanding) the reason why people like fanfiction.

[Cosmic Cosmos82]: I'm SO tired atm, i promise I'll track this post on tumblr and repost, and posting about it on Tumblr AND Instagram, and all social medias i have. I'm getting my friends and family on board, too. People, regardless of whether you or people you know write on AO3, even just spreading awareness can help. If you see the work of someone you know on the dreadful site, LET THEM KNOW! IMMEDIATELY!!! Make racket- climb into the cupboard and bang ALL THE POTS AROUND! Get those bigass party speakers that fill a whole fucking truckbed and BLAST YOUR MESSAGE TO THE WORLD! This isn't just a few- this is THOUSANDS. This is OUTRAGEOUS. This is CRIMINAL. Spread the word! Get others to spread the word! Make a domino's effect! Do EVERYTHING in your power to help. It's worth it!

The Hypocritical Accessibility Brag

[writer_of_mysteries]: Honestly, the whole "accessibility" angle just completely rubs me the wrong way.

If someone's severely dyslexic or vision impared, and need a tool to translate text to audio, screen readers already exist, using voicebanks that voice providers were hired and paid for, or volunteered/donated their time and efforts for, that don't require you to leave the actual page the content is on. Audiobooks/podfics already exist. There's absolutely no need to bring any sort of external site/app into things, especially when ai gets involved, with no clearly defined list of what it has access to, and how it's using the content it's being fed.

That should be common sense, but as I learned from the last time something like this happened, pointing out that you want your work to remain where you posted it, and you have control over its continued existence and level of public availability is ableism, somehow. That was an interesting argument to have.

[Melodramatic Raven]: What's extra frustrating is that plenty of fanfic authors are dyslexic or have ADHD etc. They're using it as an excuse, it's in no way an actual reason and it's insulting that they use that excuse because it's full of garbage and further stigmatises and pushes negative stereotypes of those disabilities. It's disgusting and shameless.

[polymorphic2346]: As a dyslexic writer who cannot even fucking do my job without some kind of readback, let me tell you how specious the disability argument is. It's probably all been said, so I'll leave it at this: I know what it's like. I can barely use this interface, can't fully use tumblrs, and have been excluded from Discord since their major UI update during Covid. You wanna know where I haven't been excluded from? A. O. Fucking. 3. Not for TTS, and they let us make our own skins for accessibility, which I did, and they let us download copies to put them on things like paperwhites, whose screen often works better for me.

That's even before we address the paywalling of fanworks and regurtitating them out into an app no one needs or asked for. If you want ot use Speechify voices, it already has a browser plugin you can use to read fanfic. It reads epubs and pdfs like any other screenreader which as I pointed out we can download from AO3 courtesy of their actual accessibility. So he's full of shit and double dipping.

This guy can fuck right off with his ableist profiteering. Glad he worked hard and did a thing, I worked hard and did a thing too and now it's his right to be a parasite? Don't think so.

Canceling my speechify sub. This new app popping up sure does explain how slow they were to fix bugs lately too.

[elusivespark]: I feel the same way. AO3 is already one of the most accessible sites on the internet. As a writer who is blind, I hate when disability is used to justify what is essentially just greed. Often, these developers never engage with the community they're trying to 'help' and never listen to feedback from those communities. They just decide that a problem exists and of course, they can solve it and make a ton of money in the process - never mind that there actually isn't a problem in the first place. They often never even make their apps and sites accessible to screenreaders, showing that they don't actually care about accessibility.

[EasterKingston, original poster]: This 100%! If anything stuff like this makes fanwork less accessible, either by discouraging people to share their work at all/scaring them into taking anti-ai measures that can interfere with screen readers/convincing them to upload it to individual patreon accounts (slippery at best)/leading them to self-publishing their work as no-longer-free, original novels (something I personally don’t have any sort of issue with, but does usually mean the fic is taken down).

[polymorphic2346]: Exactly. My fandom co-writer and I decided to grit our teeth and not hide anything to combat this sort of attrition during the last round of scrapings from the AI bros. But it does burn. Him adding the claims of good intentions is what drew me to respond to this post. For-profit activists need a lot of side-eyes and oversight to begin with, and this guy crossed the line into outright fallacy, to the point of it becoming horribly ironically ableist. Thanks for providing screenshots and histories; playing "triangulate the competing narratives" as a dyslexic is also exhausting and at times impossible.

Which Fics Got Chosen

[The_Chimeran_Hybrid]: All my smut fics are of extremely out there creatures, would’ve been very surprised to see any of them made it on there.

Was a little bit disappointed to see they hadn’t. You know you’re doing something right when the bots steal your works.

[abirdreads]: Never thought I'd be so happy to fly under the fic radar!

microspek]: the highest amount of kudos i have is on a six year old fic for a nearly 40 year old movie.

[bbunsprite]: i searched the titles of all of my most popular fics and it looks like i've been spared--i'm so thankful for my lack of notoriety.

[darsynia]: This colossal idiot stole one of Speranza's fics tho. BOLD and stupid to go after one of AO3's founding members! Let's see how it turns out.

[Lena potato123]: Same. My one and only fic has like 20 hits. Still, it sucks that fanfic authors have to deal with this kind of thievery while still being shamed for their hobby.

[Mystic printer]: It also sucks for us readers because shit like this makes authors less enthusiastic about sharing their work.

[jupitergal23]: Now I wanna read your fic!

[metalinvaderosrs]: give me the link I'll make it 21

[Astaldis]: Yes, and many have locked their works by now which is a pity, I've had very nice guest comments and didn't like excluding them. But we have no choice.

Fanfiction and Profit

[Starkren]: I'm doing my best to keep this issue visible on Twitter, so that people don't forget about it. My primary approach is to repeat that monetizing fanfiction is illegal and that even if the fics are hidden, he's still technically profiting via his subscription. I'd rather not jump through the hoops of a DMCA claim since that so often requires my real life details. Given that Speechify is tangentially related to word-stream (because the dude used his Speechify app to create this AI audio), is that potentially an avenue of attack? What I mean by that, is flooding reviews blasting him about his theft.

Legalities, Lawsuits, Visibility

[piandaoist]: Two days ago, I told people to report his app to Apple for having porn and copyrighted stories. Now, his app page doesn't load for me. I wonder if Apple took it down already. The best way to get one of these apps cancelled is to find the porn that was scraped from AO3 on the app and report it to Apple. Apple's threat to remove tumblr's app from the App Store is the reason tumblr banned porn. You get them kicked off Apple, you basically kill their revenue stream.

This Has Happened Before

[BaneAmesta]: Tech bros are surely desperate seeing something that we made for free and wondering "why do you hate easy money?" Like my dude this has to be one of the few things that people are defending to keep it free for everyone, and not just because no one wants to get in trouble with the original authors/owners of the IPs.

Also they're dumb enough to keep trying (I know they're different people) even when this is not the first time and is always met with the same response. Like the audacity to believe their attempt will somehow go under the radar/be successful enough to avoid any complaints.

We need to preach more about podfics, free TTS alternatives and similar so no one falls for these slimy traps. Sadly I don't know much about these myself to be helpful on this crusade...

[foxscribbles]: Unfortunately people stealing the work of others and trying to profit off it is common place. I know that scraping fan art and selling unauthorized prints of it has been lucrative for people on Etsy and eBay for a while now. And they rely on people being scared or not knowing how to issue takedown notices.

[soupstarsandsilence]: I’m honestly really surprised people keep trying this. After the whole thing with lore.fm or whatever tf it was called, I woulda thought psychopaths like this woulda learnt better. Goes to show how stupendously braindead, narcissistic, deranged and inhuman they are.

[Asobimo]:Can we not have one peaceful day without wannabe entrepreneurs and their bullshit AI scalping AO3 and fucking things up for everyone?!!!

Links

• does anyone know wtf word-stream.com is or where to send them a takedown request? ; archive link by Tumblr user ekingston (Dec 22, 2024)
• 'Netflix of audiobooks' scrapes thousands of fanworks off ao3 without permission. Yours, likely, included; archive link by ekingston (Tumblr) (Dec 25, 2024)
• So your fic was stolen & then quickly hidden from view by Speechify CEO: update & full recap regarding the word-stream situation; archive link; another later link by EasterKingston (Reddit) (Dec 25, 2024)
• Hundred of Fics Stolen by A.I. Scraper for Profit; archive link by J.D. Riley ("Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and Word-Stream admits to having stolen hundreds of fanfictions to power a profit-driven audiobook subscription service.") (Substack) (Dec 27, 2024)