The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility.
Wordfreq is a program that tracked the ever-changing ways people used more than 40 different languages by analyzing millions of sources across Wikipedia, movie and TV subtitles, news articles, books, websites, Twitter, and Reddit. The system could be used to analyze changing language habits as slang and popular culture changed and language evolved, and was a resource for academics who study such things. In a note on the project’s GitHub, creator Robyn Speer wrote that the project “will not be updated anymore.”
The project creator doesn’t mince words:
wordfreq was built by collecting a whole lot of text in a lot of languages. That used to be a pretty reasonable thing to do, and not the kind of thing someone would be likely to object to. Now, the text-slurping tools are mostly used for training generative AI, and people are quite rightly on the defensive. If someone is collecting all the text from your books, articles, Web site, or public posts, it’s very likely because they are creating a plagiarism machine that will claim your words as its own.
So I don’t want to work on anything that could be confused with generative AI, or that could benefit generative AI.
OpenAI and Google can collect their own damn data. I hope they have to pay a very high price for it, and I hope they’re constantly cursing the mess that they made themselves.
Seems pretty mild and reasonable, to be honest.
Yeah, it seems really restrained for someone who has to end a project they’ve put so much effort into.
