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Why wordfreq will not be updated
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Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated
#112If the language you’re processing was generated by AI, it’s no longer NLP, it’s ALP.
Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's an arms race, but it's an open question who wins. For a while I thought email as a medium was doomed, but spammers mostly lost that arms race. One interesting difference is that with spam, the large tech companies were basically all fighting against it. But here, many of the large tech companies are either providing tools to spammers (LLMs) or actively encouraging spammy behaviors (by integrating LLMs in…
> but spammers mostly lost that arms race I'm not saying this is impossible but that's going to be an uphill sell for me as a concept. According to some quick stats I checked I'm getting roughly 600 emails per day, about 550 of which go directly to spam filtering, and of the remaining 50, I'd say about 6 are actually emails I want to be receiving. That's an impressive amount overall for whoever built this particular…
I’m not sure what you’ve done to get that level of spam, but I get about 10 spam emails a day at most and that’s across multiple accounts including one that I’ve used for almost 30 years and had used on Usenet which was the uber-spam magnet. A couple newer (10–15 year old) addresses which I’ve published on webpages with mailto links attract maybe one message a week and one that I keep for a specialized purpose (fiction and poetry submissions) gets maybe one to two messages per year, mostly because it’s of the form example@example.com so easily guessed by enterprising spammers.
Looking at the last days’ spam¹ I have three 419-style scams (widows wanting to give away their dead husbands’ grand piano or multi-million euro estate) and three phishing attempts. There are duplicate messages in each category.
About fifteen years ago, I did a purge of mailing list subscriptions and there’s very little that comes in that I don’t want, most notably a writer who’s a nice guy, but who interpreted my question about a comment he made on a podcast as an invitation to be added to his manually managed email list and given that it’s only four or five messages a year, I guess I can live with that.
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1. I cleaned out spam yesterday while checking for a confirmation message from a purchase.
Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
This feels like a second, magnitudes larger Eternal September. I wonder how much more of this the Internet can take before everyone just abandons it entirely. My usage is notably lower than it was in even 2018, it's so goddamn hard to find anything worth reading anymore (which is why I spend so much damn time here, tbh).
I think it's an arms race, but it's an open question who wins. For a while I thought email as a medium was doomed, but spammers mostly lost that arms race. One interesting difference is that with spam, the large tech companies were basically all fighting against it. But here, many of the large tech companies are either providing tools to spammers (LLMs) or actively encouraging spammy behaviors (by integrating LLMs in…
> but spammers mostly lost that arms race.
Advertising in your mails isn't Google's.
Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated
#115Sad. I'd love to see by how much the use of world "delve" has increased since 2021...
Same for me but with the word “crucial”.
Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated
#116Reading through this entire thread, I suspect that somehow generative AI actually became a political issue. Polarized politics is like a vortex sucking all kinds of unrelated things in.
In case that doesn't get my comment completely buried, I will go ahead and say honestly that even though "AI slop" and paywalled content is a problem, I don't think that generative AI in itself is a negative at all. And I also think that part of this person's reaction is that LLMs have made previous NLP techniques, such a those based on simple usage counts etc., largely irrelevant.
What was/is wordfreq used for, and can those tasks not actually be done more effectively with a cutting edge language model of some sort these days? Maybe even a really small one for some things.
Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated
#117> the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing
That’s neither fair nor accurate. That slop is ultimately generated by the humans who run those models; they are attempting (perhaps poorly) to communicate something.
> two companies that I already despise
Life’s too short to go through it hating others.
> it's very likely because they are creating a plagiarism machine that will claim your words as its own
That begs the question. Plagiarism has a particular definition. It is not at all clear that a machine learning from text should be treated any differently from a human being learning from text: i.e., duplicating exact phrases or failing to credit ideas may in some circumstances be plagiarism, but no-one is required to append a statement crediting every text he has ever read to every document he ever writes.
Credits: every document I have ever read grin
Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated
#118"I don't think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans." We've been past the tipping point when it comes to text for some time, but for video I feel we are living through the watershed moment right now. Especially smaller children don't have a good intuition on what is real and what is not. When I get asked if the person in a video is real, I still feel pretty confident to answer but…
I never thought about that. Humans losing their ability to detect AI content from reality ? It's frightening.
It's worse: they don't even care.
Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated
#119"I don't think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans." We've been past the tipping point when it comes to text for some time, but for video I feel we are living through the watershed moment right now. Especially smaller children don't have a good intuition on what is real and what is not. When I get asked if the person in a video is real, I still feel pretty confident to answer but…
I never thought about that. Humans losing their ability to detect AI content from reality ? It's frightening.
This video's worth a watch if you want to get a sense of the current state of things. Despite the (deliberately) clickbait title, the video itself is pretty even-handed.
It's by Language Jones, a YouTube linguist. Title: "The AI Apocalypse is Here"
Re: Why wordfreq will not be updated
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguably it is a form of language evolution. I bet humans have started using "delve" more too, on average. I think the best we can do is look at the trends and think about potential causes.
“Seamless”, “honed”, “unparalleled”, “delve” are now polluting the landscape because of monkeys repeating what ChatGPT says without even questioning what the words mean. Everything is “seamless” nowadays. Like I am seamlessly commenting here. Arguably, the meaning of these words evolve due to misuse too.
I see a lot of writing in my day-to-day, and the words that stick out most are things like "plethora" and "utilized". They're not terribly obscure, but they're just 'odd' and, maybe, formal enough to really stick out when overused.