10 mo. ago • 100%

Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI

futurism.com Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI

The popular language-learning program Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contracted translators last month amid a generative AI push.

Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI.

For the interested, here's the place where you can request your personal data and delete your account

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122 comments

duolingo is a textbook example of a nice small startup, with great ideas that is then completely overtaken my MBAs who run it into the ground as soon as there is enough of a client base to Sell. you fucking fucks all suck.

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I wasn't quite sure what to think about this, so I've asked my local LLM. Seems it is fine.

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Much will be lost. Language is human. Idioms and more will be missed. There is no doubt that the Duolingo product will not be as accurate.

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Honestly, when it comes to duolingo, you're probably best off sticking to Spanish or stuff like that.

I tried out a course in my native language, and it really wasn't great beyond the basics. Loads of mistakes.

And if you're going to be paying for that, you might as well buy (or pirate) a proper Spanish course.

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Sayonara, Duolingo.

As a writer on the internet with no power to stop these companies from scraping my work, you now want to teach me using someone else's stolen words and teach someone English using mine. Go fuck yourself.

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I don't gamble, but if I did I would bet that the AI is going to teach a lot of mistakes and maybe even be the cause of someone saying something wrong, like an insult instead of a greeting or something.

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Duolingo isn’t a good resource for learning a language, it’s focus is user retention

Innovative Language and Lingodeer are better

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I noticed that they stopped giving free streak freezes two weeks ago. I have a 1200 day streak and my premium sub renews this month but I might just switch to another platform.

Edit: Canceled my subscription and left feedback about streak freezes. Three days later I get a free streak freeze. Not sure if it was a glitch or what. I'm gonna wait to confirm before renewing my sub.

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I've seen quality drops of Duolingo, ever since their ... IPO, sadly.

Anyway, here's some ways you can milk the rest of the Duolingo before completely abandoning it.

Use the web version, and type in all the answers if it's possible. Selecting words are good for introducing new words (and reminder in case you forgot), but by typing it on your own, it's faster to commit into memory.

Use classroom mode to get unlimited hearts, create your own classroom and invite yourself in. I assume that Duolnigo will probably eventually stop this loophole

Use search engine to search for the sentences you're unsure of. No, don't use machine translation, but search on the internet, and see if the sentence ever being used by the sites (news, academic, or personal homepage) using the target language.

I sadly still don't know what other comparable free alternatives to Duolingo. Anki is great, but it's largely flashcard for words, not sentences (unless you want to create your own deck). The others require subscription fee.

Other methods? Search for pdf of language grammar files, there are a lot out there. Some are godawful to read, especially those 'Comprehensive Grammar Guide' books. Some are amazing, e.g. Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese.
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This is going to be a wild year for the white-collar bubble. Always remember that corporate wants "good enough for cheap" not "best in class."

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"Enshitification"...
Yes I seem to remember how enshitified everything became after the firing of weavers do to the invention of the Loom.
The fuck you think was gonna happen?
Seriously all this whinging online about AI is getting ridiculous.
Get a fucking hobby.

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Expect a lot more "white collar workers laid off due to AI" posts coming. I wonder how long it will take for a (very well resourced, those are status-y jobs) movement to form in response.

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The CEOs face the day he realizes all it takes to automate his company is a personal computer: 😃

The CEOs face the day after he realizes all it takes to automate his company is a personal computer: 🫠

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I think a lot about writing a story about some sort of Enshittification Avenger. So when a reasonably good service decides to enshittify, the avenger breaks into their board's house and beats the living shit out of them.

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I just said to someone yesterday on Mastodon that it seems as though they're not using humans any more, because WTF is this shit?

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Disappointing, but not surprising. I know I'm not going to "learn" a language with Duolingo, but it's been nice recognizing a few words and phrases when I hear them. But I don't really trust that a bunch of overworked and underpaid contractors are going to catch every error using AI is going to introduce. At least there are already alternatives in this thread for me to look through.

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I use Duolingo for German but I’d happily switch to something else if they’re going to pull this shit. I’ll often times take things from Duolingo and run them through the Translate app on iOS to see if there are differences. It’s not ideal, but I also have no allegiance to companies.

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I never liked Duolingo anyway. It's a bit stupid, it just teaches you some basic phrases without explaining the grammar behind it. So you're not really learning anything.

And I really hate 'gamification' in general. I love computer games but not gamified learning or exercising etc. It just puts me off.

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What could be possibly go wrong?

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This time last year, I could still see the forum posts to related lessons when I'd get something wrong. Now, when I'm told my answer is incorrect, I have nothing to go off.

I'm trying to learn the baby steps of Korean. Being able to quickly read what I did incorrectly (and why, because usually people eould explain the grammar) was great. I hate that it's gone, and I'm considering making Busuu my main app

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People, there is an opensource alternative just waiting for your contributions https://librelingo.app/

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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Duolingo, the app to work on something every day for years and be no more skilled in that ability than if you did nothing. Now fewer people will have useless jobs which is a problem since in many ways it's difficult to survive working a useful job.

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The article seems to indicate they are using to reduce the amount of work that have to do in writing prompts, but still have translators review what the AI spits out. I think that’s different to SuperDuo which I believe is mean’t to use AI to be more conversational.

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I need some more copium. Not Again :'(

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🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summary

The popular language-learning app Duolingo cut 10 percent of its contracted translators last month amid a push to integrate generative AI into its services, multiple outlets have reported.

It's another alarming turn in an increasingly AI-laden labor market in which company leaders continue to implement automated technology wherever they can — often, as in this case, at the cost of human jobs.

According to Bloomberg, the firings were doled out just a few weeks after Duolingo bragged in a November letter to shareholders that the company was harnessing AI to produce "new content dramatically faster."

Duolingo also reportedly uses AI to generate some of the voices heard in various in-app language scripts and to prompt AI-generated feedback to users.

To make matters even more depressing: in a late December Reddit thread, a site user claiming to be one of the fired Duolingo translators alleged that their former team's remaining contractors are now tasked with simply checking AI-generated text for errors.

Trusting translation AI — meanwhile pushing remaining contractors to fact-check presumably high numbers of those "dramatically faster" content outputs — may well come at the cost of such nuance, potentially flattening the learning process and rendering language robotic.

Saved 52% of original text.

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The Extinction level meteor can't come soon enough.

Time to pack it in and give some other microorganism a shot at the evolutionary big-leagues. Maybe they'll do better.

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