A child who stole his letter to Santa from a website has found himself on “the Naughty List” and will have to meet with the Big Man himself during his office hours.
One Darby Pilkowicz, of Hardin, MT copied a majority of his letter from an exemplar the US Postal Service posted on their website showing youngsters how to compose a letter to Santa.
Santa decided to go with this type of software after he found himself reading the same letter over and over again last year.
“The program immediately caught it, and now I can have that teachable moment with Pilkowicz on the matter,” said Mr. Kringle.
That’s right—Santa is using DeepSearch technology to perform contextual analysis and word placement scans when reading the letters from children. Then, they are compared to a massive database of content, including letters to Santa from all over the world.
If similarities are found, they are reported with a percentage which will tell Jolly Old St. Nick how much of the letter is similar to the content in his databases. Then he can dig in and see exactly what is matching and how much.
Santa decided to go with this type of software after he found himself reading the same letter over and over again last year.
Even though it was expensive, Santa decided to go with Turnitin because of their robust Similarity and Originality tools, but also because they gave him a sweet discount when he upgraded his account to include iThenticate, a high-stakes plagiarism tool used by academic researchers and publishers.
The news has thousands of children “sweating it out,” hoping that somehow their letter will get by undetected. The kids are so scared, that one nervous child came out and admitted that she didn’t copy, but “let other children copy hers.”
Another child wrote a second letter to Santa, redacting all the parts he stole from another letter he “borrowed from a sibling.” Witnesses say it is nothing more than a header with an entire page of strikethroughs and blackouts.
Some children have even taken to pen and paper, thinking that they can outsmart the program by writing messy or making it really small so the parts they pirated might go by undetected.
We’ll see if those strategies pay off come Christmas morning.