Notice: MDZS And SVSSS Gotcha For Gaza

Notice: MDZS and SVSSS Gotcha for Gaza

Hello all! I haven't seen any posts about this over here on Tumblr, so here goes. MDZSaction and SVSSSAction (on Twitter) are organizing charity drives for Care for Gaza, a non-profit providing food and other necessities to displaced families in Palestine. Participants can make donations and receive fanworks in exchange or take part in the event as creators (or both)!

Note re: donation tiers—both events follow the same pricing structure of $5USD for S/FW prompts and $8USD for N/SFW prompts.

MDZS Gotcha: Rules and sign-ups will remain open here until 3/22. The main event (donations/prompt submissions) will run from 3/24 to 3/30.

SVSSS Gotcha: Sign-ups open on 3/18, and the event itself will run from 4/13 to 4/21. The event carrd is here.

For TGCF fans: the TGCF Gotcha closed yesterday, but it raised over $3.5k USD during the prompt submission period! Stay tuned for the upcoming art/fanfiction. :)

Please consider joining as a creator, submitting a prompt, or sharing this post if you can't do either! You can also check out some of the fanworks from the TGCF Gotcha here, since a few creators have already started posting.

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

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See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

OH NOW THAT YOU'VE FINISHED READING TGCF I have to know . . . what are your thoughts on the whole Feng Xin and Jian Lan plot and how it ended?

TBH I don’t have a LOT of thoughts at the moment- that’s going to be something I’ll be thinking retroactively about, but I like it a lot as a Feng Xin story- he’s been so consistently rejected by the people he loves, the people he’d do anything for, and each and every one of them has purposefully pushed him away in order to “protect” him in one way or another. Whether they were right to do this, I think it’s a tragedy of his life that I’m glad to see slowly turning around. We get to see that even though paths diverge, he has never closed any doors to any of them, and in fact stubbornly holds them open even when the person on the other side is trying to turn the lock

Are you excited about the Mononoke film? It should be out this summer.

I am very stoked.

I love Mononoke, one of my favorite animes.

I'm ready.

I think it’s so funny during the exchange on the balloon when sokka is like, “yeah being good at war seems to run in the family,” and zuko gets all defensive and goes, “hold on, not everyone is like that!” and at first sokka thinks he’s talking about himself, but then zuko reveals that he’s talking about his uncle. and sokka just has to sit there mentally calculating whether it would be a good idea to bring up the fact that historically, his uncle is great at war. if i had to attempt to transcribe his inner monologue in that moment it would just be “don’t bring up the dragon of the west don’t bring up the dragon of the west this guy is willingly sacrificing his life for your self-indulgent suicide mission you need him on your side don’t bring up the dragon of the west…” at which point he then looks back up at zuko and says thru gritted teeth, “haha yeah. no, cuz like, totally. for sure.”

Tumblr is auto-enabling all blogs to be used for AI

This is fucking stupid, you have to do this for every individual blog you may have. Go to your Blog > Blog Settings (scroll all the way down) > Enable prevention for third-party sharing.

Even if you're not an artist, please do so especially if you reblog since it may take a reblogged post for AI-training, I'm not certain but it's better to be safe than sorry.