Technology

60059 readers

3900 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

437

Project Analyzing Human Language Usage Shuts Down Because ‘Generative AI Has Polluted the Data’ (www.404media.co)

submitted 3 months ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] T156@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

At least in theory you could still do NLP from online sources, but the sheer amount of work necessary to ensure that you got the bots out makes it unfeasible.

Not just that, but the increasing number of sites blocking or having countermeasures against the tools they use also increases the amount of work/makes it harder.

Several years ago, it would have been easy and cheap to noodle up a quick Twitter or Reddit bot to churn through posts and spit out the posts on the other side. These days, you need to pay for that, and in some cases, pay quite a lot.

X (formerly known as Twitter), for example, wants to charge $100/month, and Reddit wants $0.24 per 100 API calls.

You can scrape, of course, but that risks getting you banned, if you're not going to run into barriers. The website formerly known as Twitter no longer allows you to see parent tweets, nor replies if you're not logged in, for example.