Hundred of Fics Stolen by A.I. Scraper for Profit

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and Word-Stream admits to having stolen hundreds of fanfictions to power a profit-driven audiobook subscription service

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?

Cliff (or Ofek) Weitzman is the current Chief Executive Officer (CEO—oh how all of us love CEOs now, don’t we?) of Speechify which boasts official partnerships with known crunchy weirdo Gwyneth Paltrow, and fake-ass scandal-ridden YouTuber MrBeast. The idea behind Speechify is that it can use more-realistic AI-crafted voices, sometimes styled from actors or musicians, to read aloud content that might be considered inaccessible to those who are unable to read in the traditional fashion, such as people with disabilities or with jobs that would let them function while having an audiobook on the in background (you know, like CEOs). With this technology, Weitzman has created what has been called “the Netflix of audiobooks,” a service called “Word-Stream” which uses a subscription model and scrapes internet content ranging from articles to copyright free books (likely from Project Gutenberg) to fanfictions in order to make money off of what is available for free elsewhere. In his “About” section, he tells the story of himself as a child, struggling with dyslexia and crafting ways around it which led ultimately to the creation of his current AI monstrosity.

This isn’t the first time that people have looked at Ao3 and seen it as an untapped financial resource just dripping with potential for sleazy attempts at grifting. The Archive’s existence depends on the acceptance that all transformative works therein are free of charge due to the original intellectual property rights belonging to literally nobody who writes for the site. What’s this mean? Well for example, I don’t own the rights to any Marvel characters but that doesn’t stop me from writing Baron Zemo and the Winter Soldier fucking nasty on their way to make an attempt to capture Omega Red—I just can’t make money doing it because I’m not the one who gets to decide what canonically happens to these characters. These aren’t my little dudes. I didn’t invent them. To make money by utilizing other people’s intellectual property is unethical—to make money by stealing the free transformative works developed by passionate fan writers while also utilizing the original inventor’s intellectual property is even more slimy. Not only are you violating IP rights, you’re violating the explicit agreement that transformative works are to be not-for-profit.

Something about AI Tech Bros makes them particularly averse to the idea that things they did not create do not belong to them or are not fair game to feed into their AI Vomit Machines. They think that they can feed whatever they want into the “IN” slot and whatever comes out the “OUT” slot is theirs to do with what they will, even if that content is hardly changed at all. What this translates into from a comparative perspective is the idea that because I own my own shit after eating a banana, a banana I didn’t pay for shouldn’t need to be bought. And what if there’s something that didn’t digest that I stole? After it comes out my ass, is it mine? According to these guys, the answer to that is “yes.” This is why AI Bros tend to scrape as much content as possible from places they think they can get away with it and are shocked when they face backlash. Weitzman, convinced that his debilitating dyslexia means that he should be able to feed anything he wants into AI text-to-speech for his own personal profit, is the latest of these unscrupulous grifters to make the attempt at monetizing content from Ao3, transforming hundreds of works into paywalled audiobooks with often poorly-made AI cover images (my favorite is the cover of the King James Bible, having been converted to the King Janes Bible…haha, silly robots).

Kingston, having discovered the grift and having gone through several steps already to figure out what to do, made another horrifying discovery when another intrepid Reddit user signed up for Weitzman’s app in order to take a gander at the pricing, finding an intentionally obscured payment scale pattern that listed charges by the day rather than monthly with pre-sale prices far above the monthly charges even for major media companies like Netflix. Every single one of these fics that were stolen are available for free online and Weitzman’s argument for the charges boiled down to the costs being utilized to fund the process of transforming these stolen works into “higher quality” AI audiobooks, as if he had any right in the first place to do anything with them and as though podfics don’t already exist for free.

Weitzman’s insistence that they “support all valid take down notices” ignores the fact that his site and app stole hundreds if not thousands of works that cannot and will not all be identified and reclaimed by their authors and he entirely avoids the fact that he is indirectly profiting off of the intellectual properties of major corporations and entities who have a lot more money than fan writers. What’s the deal going to be when DC Comics steps in and tells this guy they’re gonna pack his shit for making money on Kara Danvers? Weitzman wants fan writers to not only write for his AI Vomit Machine, he also wants them to inherently agree to an “opt out” model of his grift. As Tumblr user murphythetoaster commented under his comment on one of Kingston’s posts, “Why is this opt-out and not opt-in? Why was permission not asked from creators before their work were taken and used? What happens to the people who never heard that their work was stolen, to the people who aren’t getting interactions on their hard work because it’s being viewed on a platform they weren’t contacted by, were made aware of, etc?” [sic]

As if it would make any of this better, in his non-apology comment to one of Kingston’s Tumblr threads, Weitzman claimed that in a further adaptation of the app, there would be an option to “tip” the writers of the works—still an overt violation of the ethics and legal standards of fanworks. Oof. As if he couldn’t get any more out of touch with fanwork culture and the society of fandom as a whole, he apologized for “tone deaf wording,” in previous replies. Honey no amount of wording is going to fix that the whole premise is absolutely fucking outrageously unethical and probably illegal. Discovering that he wasn’t going to be able to stop fandoms from coming for his throat, he deleted all his responses and fell back on sockpuppets for a little while in an attempt to do damage control before he disappeared entirely.

Soon, Word-Stream was unavailable, coming back eventually with the fanworks section conspicuously missing. Nevertheless, as Kingston has noted, the full texts of those scraped works aren’t gone from Weitzman’s possession, and could theoretically still be utilized in some underhanded way in the future, leaving fic writers wary of how and when they’re going to see their fic ideas popping up in AI generated slop fic somewhere along the line in Weitzman’s future “business” ventures. Here’s hoping whatever happens, it’s destroyed just as decisively. And Cliff? Be a better person and do your own fucking work for once. We’re not your mommy.