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Sat down to read my student's MA Thesis (WIP) and she's doing a good job. There's definitely stuff we need to fix, but she's good!

It's a welcome change...

God, I still remember that idiot student whose brilliant epiphany built upon "Women are human beings too!"

I will not disclose the actual main theme of his work, but it was incredibly sexist, extremely stupid and just so, so poorly written...

Oh, and like 1/2 of it was plagiarized word for word, but he didn't bother to change anything, because he just ran it through Google Translate (to Bulgarian). He thought I wouldn't realize.

Well, his language would rapidly go from limited vocabulary and questionable grammar to almost academic-level phrasing, and the peculiar structure quickly gave away the source language, so that was that.

I guess he never suspected that a LAZY person would be checking his work...

Yeah, I'm lazy, I know all the tricks 🙄

Well, now with LLMs I probably don't know them anymore 😕

@muiiio
I recently learned a trick at an OSINT class: if you put a piece of text into an LLM, and ask it which language it was translated from or which famous author likely wrote the original, it may just give you the right answer.

I mean, LLMs are mostly built from plagiarism after all. Identifying and imitating writing styles is their bread-and-butter. 🙄

@chunshek @muiiio how do you validate an answer specifying language, but not specific source?

Chunshek has moved

@mapto
As with anything spewed out from an LLM: you cannot "trust" it. So there is no validation from the get-go.

You will need to corroborate the output with other evidence. My course instructor said they use the output as starting point for deeper searches and investigations.

@muiiio