The wordfreq data is a snapshot of language that could be found in various online sources up through 2021. There are several reasons why it will not be updated anymore.
# Generative AI has polluted the data I don't think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans. The open Web (via OSCAR) was one of wordfreq's data sources. Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies. [...] As one example, [Philip Shapira reports]() that ChatGPT (OpenAI's popular brand of generative language model circa 2024) is obsessed with the word "delve" in a way that people never have been, and caused its overall frequency to increase by an order of magnitude. ## Information that used to be free became expensive [...] Even if X made its raw data feed available (which it doesn't), there would be no valuable information to be found there. Reddit also stopped providing public data archives, and now they sell their archives at a price that only OpenAI will pay. ## I don't want to be part of this scene anymore wordfreq used to be at the intersection of my interests. I was doing corpus linguistics in a way that could also benefit natural language processing tools. The field I know as "natural language processing" is hard to find these days. It's all being devoured by generative AI. Other techniques still exist but generative AI sucks up all the air in the room and gets all the money. It's rare to see NLP research that doesn't have a dependency on closed data controlled by OpenAI and Google, two companies that I already despise. 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. https://github.com/rspeer/wordfreq/blob/master/SUNSET.md [1] https://pshapira.net/2024/03/31/delving-into-delve/
