LLMs: plagiarism devices
So I got roped into teaching American History 1, Settlement to Civil War, at the college, again. I’m in Florida. Florida was, and is, rabidly rebellious. There’s a reason why Governor DeSatan was elected.
So the Heap Big Paper is on the American Civil War. I spent a lot of time on the ACW. I ensure that it is clear that the Confederacy was doomed from the start; if they failed to knock the Federals out in a year to 18 months, they would lose. No ifs about it. Earlier on I had spoken about Winfield Scott, the man who won the Mexican war even though Mexico had more and better trained and equipped troops than the US. (They did. They also had Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Santa Anna thought that he was the Napoleon of the West. He was the McClellan of Mexico.) Winfield Scott created the plan dubbed ‘the Anaconda’ by his detractors at the start of the ACW. The name was adopted by those who made it work, the way that the Big Bang was first called that by the exceedingly atheist Fred Hoyle, to attack the Catholic priest who thought it up, and was then, to Hoyle’s dismay, adopted by its proponents. The Anaconda was simple: strangle the south. Cut off trade. Cut off supplies. Starve them out. The beauty of it was that the Army need merely not lose, and provide garrisons for seized seaports and such. The Navy would do the heavy lifting. The Army would have to seize enough of the major rivers, such as the Mississippi, to deny their use to the south, but did not have to, for example, take the southern capital. Just surround them and squeeze.
Marse Bob _did_ have to take the Federal capital if he wanted to win; thus his expeditions to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and disaster. If he just sat and waited, he would lose, and he knew it. The great land battles in the East were Marse Bob trying to kill the Anaconda before it killed him. As long as the Federal forces held together, the Anaconda would strangle the south. When Grant took Vicksburg and the next day Longstreet failed to hammer Meade, it was game over. In Lincoln’s words, “the Father of the Waters again flows unvexed to the sea”; the entire length of the Mississippi, plus the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Missouri, were in Federal hands. The Confederacy was split into two. And Lee had to retreat from Gettysburg, having lost far too many men for no gain. Marse Bob would never go north again, he couldn’t. Grant would come south to chase him. And the US Navy blockaded Confederate ports, and mounted assaults on them, and cut the south off from the world… except through Mexico. Except that Mexico had been invaded by France and their was a major war going on. And the Mexicans remembered who it was who had wanted all of Mexico, plus Central America down to Costa Rica, for slave plantations. The Anaconda strangled the South. Farragut took Mobile Bay; Sherman took Atlanta and marched to the sea; Grant vowed to fight on this line if it took all summer; Wilson rode from the Mississippi to the Atlantic; Sheridan burned down the Shenandoah. Marse Bob could do nothing.
Needless to say, True Sons of the South really don’t like hearing that Marse Bob killed a lot of people for nothing. They really don’t.
So I got a nice paper from a True Son of the South. A paper which I knew for certain he didn’t agree with. A paper containing a great many very familiar sequences, in several cases word-for-word familiar. I dug a old copy of my thesis out of my files, and lo! So much was identical. Including the references. It seems that m’man had been quite specific when setting the parameters for his LLM search, and there were only so many possible sources in the LLM training data. If he had been less specific, odds are that the LLM would not have created something so close to my own paper. M’man got a zero, and failed the class. He appealed. I gave a copy of his paper to the dean and then a copy of my paper. M’man got himself a road scholarship, as in hit the road, Jack, and don’t come back no more.
Go ahead, boyz’grrlz. Use that LLM. If I catch you, you will regret it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
