William Marvel: Frauds & Fallacies, Inc.

Last week, a friend forwarded me a month-old video entitled "Fitz John Porter: When Politics Destroyed a War Hero." In something over 13 minutes, it summarized my 2021-vintage biography of Porter — adopting my interpretation of his story in its entirety, without attribution. Slight mispronunciations in the audio left me suspecting that this was a production that was at least assisted by artificial intelligence, but there were so many ads interrupting the YouTube version that some human was likely pocketing cash from it.

The video was credited to "Mad Hatter's Civil War History," but no human's name was associated with the Mad Hatter. Some of the numerous videos on that channel offered amusing instances of mistaken facts, misspellings or mispronunciations. A segment called "Joshua Chamberlin (sic) at Gettysburg," about Chamberlain commanding the 20th Maine on Little Round Top, identified him initially as "Richard" Chamberlain, noting that he was from Brewer, Maine, on the "Panascopic" (i.e. Penobscot) River.