Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI.
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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.
Similar to Memrise, which was really fun when you could make your own mems using imagesearch and customise everything… And now is a rubbish duolingo clone.
Enshittification
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.
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: 🫠
i wish workers would realize they can just work without CEOs, i know of at least one factory that was set to close down and workers just… kept working, eventually gaining the right to buy the factory and run it as a co-operative
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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.
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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.
I just got free streak freezes 11 days ago.
So perhaps it’s regional.
What other platform is available?
The duolingo format was never popular with polyglots. The game format makes it easy to feel like you did something which is a great thing, but the is the only pro people who have learned multiple languages find with it.
There is a lot of debate about what the best way to start is, but all agree that you need to interact with the real language in real world type settings (watching a movie in the language with subtitles is real world, though you need to make an effort to listen not just read!) They also agree that time is important, you need to study at least an hour every day to make progress.
Anecdotally, a friend who’s pretty handy at languages uses more Memrise than Duolingo now. Similar sort of setup, but with a different style of delivery - more visual cues and a better repetition approach.
I just tried it out and I like it a lot better than duolingo.
Duolingo is super gamified and you can’t keep practicing after you made a few mistakes. I just practiced for an hour with memrise and it was nice. There’s also video exercises in the app, and you can also practice chatting (with an AI probably?). I hope it holds up.
I would love to compare babbel too, but Arabic is not available there.
Awesome, I think I may go back to a language myself. Thanks for checking it out and letting us know!
Just fyi you can keep practicing as much as you want in Duolingo, just tap the heart in the top right and click practice to earn more hearts.
Huh, I didn’t know that. I just tried it out and it worked.
I think I’ll stick with memrise for now.
Thanks though!
in my experience, Memrise teaches you useful phrases much faster, while Duolingo drills you about horses eating blue apples and turtles wearing yellow hats.
To be fair, as a Duolingo hater myself, I do see the logic in teaching wacky phrases. It at least gives me the impression that it makes it easier to improvise sentences based on the grammar you’ve learnt by drilling “the bear should eat some cheese when it rains” or whatever.
Learn how to say “two tabs of acid” in 10 languages
Back in the day, I found Rosetta Stone to be a decent approach, it’s the only reason I still know how to say “the kid is under the plane” in Arabic, without barely knowing any Arabic (it was in the first free demo lessons). The context turned a bit dark after 9/11, though…
CDs are often available at libraries too!
I’ve found Babble to be okay
Do you mean Babbel? Hadn’t heard of it, will keep it in mind
I thought this was BabelJS for a sec
Yup, that’s the one
Sadly it didn’t work for me. I liked the concept but gave up after two weeks because I didn’t enjoy the experience at all and didn’t seem to make any progress (Swiss learning Spanish). YMMV of course.
Free streak freeze? As in an option to stop an arbitrary counter that does nothing from being reset?
Humans are so massively susceptible to gamification. It’s nice for providing motivation, but it ends up being like an addiction the way companies leverage it.
I want my language learning app to have things like that, to help motivate me to keep coming back every day.
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.
The movement of hating rich people, and pretending like they’re not part of our society? I think it already exists.
Well, that’s a bit of a salty tangent, but yeah, I guess they could take a class warfare sort of line on it. The other classical options are going full luddite, or just blaming a minority. Maybe they’ll come up with something new, because I have trouble picturing laid off creatives spouting any of these.
Right now, I think people are firmly in the denial stage. For whatever reason the thread isn’t federating properly for me, but on beehaw I can see others in here saying human exceptionalism stuff, which is kind of not in accordance with science.
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
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.
What could be possibly go wrong?
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.
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.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
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?
This is frustrating, but it has always been an issue; and usually the more you advance in a language tree the more it happens, because fewer people have found the problem and reported it. It’s a human problem that comes with not considering every possibility when creating an exercise. I’d imagine that using AI (in addition to humans) would actually help reduce cases like this, since they could be detected before users run into them.
Interesting, I usually question my English skills if something like this happens!
It’s because a good translation is not (always) literal.
In the German version it says taglich in hamburg. In English you would indeed put an adverb (like daily) at the end. It works the other way around but it’s not really what a native English speaker would say.
Not true at all. OP’s construction is perfectly valid english.
Absolutely this. I’d have argued that ‘every day’ is a more idiomatic translation than ‘daily’, and what native speakers would say, but that’s irrelevant. English tends to emphasise the end of sentences as the most important part, so all these translations are correct depending on the nuance that you intend:
- Daily in Hamburg, many ships arrive (as opposed to eg. cars, or few ships)
- Daily, many ships arrive in Hamburg / Many ships arrive daily in Hamburg (as opposed to eg. Bremen)
- Many ships arrive in Hamburg daily (as opposed to eg. weekly)
Wouldn’t question any of those constructions as a native speaker. In fact, original responders’ example was why I gave up on Duolingo myself originally, some years ago. Translating ‘future tense’ sentences from Spanish into English or back again is always going to be a matter of opinion, since English doesn’t have the verb conjugations that Spanish does. Guessing the ‘sanctified answer’ is tedious, when a lot of the time it’s not even the most natural form of a sentence.
Isn’t English able to disambiguate by using helper words like “will” or “would”?
What tenses can’t be translated completely?
Yeah, this is frustrating.
I can handle absurd sentences like “The dog is cooking the dinner”, and actually finds them beneficial because it prevents me from guessing the whole sentence.
But this is a sign that not enough human efforts are poured into create permutation of the answers.
Let me guess, the full sentence was: “Last night we ate the dog cooked for dinner”… /s
nope, “The dog is cooking a dinner” is that kind of absurdist sentence that works. So that I just don’t guess a human on the subject position. Or ‘eating’ for the verb
“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.In a capitalistic world where your right to stay alive is determined by the money you make, replacing himan jobs by machine ones is a real problem.
If what was happening was “ok so the machines are gonna do that so you’re gonna have a lot more free time but you still get your wages”, I for one would be happy.
But what’s happening is more along the lines of “well I hope you didn’t just get a mortgage because here’s the door hahaha don’t be sad think lf the extra money the shareholders are going to make” and it’s a real problem.
Just because it’s logical that shitty bosses take shitty decisions which impact negatively other person’s lives doesn’t mean we can’t be upset and vocal about it.
Then y’all Luddites can make a new luddite sub and post your complaints over there.
This is a technology sub.
In any world, you just can’t stop progress, so complaints will be filed under “G”, for garbage.
And the world will keep on spinning.Hi skeptomatic, Beehaw Technology mod here. To be clear, this community is not only for the uncritical admiration technological development or the tech sector. It is a community for discussion of Technology in general, which will likely include discussion of the effects of technology on society. Those topics very well may include discussions of how and when those technologies, the environment they are developed in, or the systems they enable are harmful to human flourishing.
You are absolutely welcome to defend generative AI as a useful or positive development - I personally think it’s a really interesting technology with some major potential (although I think we’re probably in a hype cycle and it’s being applied in all kinds of ways that don’t really make sense), but I also recognize that there are potential social pitfalls in it’s development and deployment. Those ideas are worth discussing in a kind, civil manner.
Lastly, when you comment here on Beehaw, please remember our rule: Be(e) Nice.
You make a good point, like how when CGI first came out and everyone had to have it in their movies. Some good movies were made laughable or absolutely worse when practical effects could have done the job.
A loom is a precision machine. You know exactly what you’re going to get when you use one. It’s output was identical to manual work, only a lot more efficient and less error prone.
There is no “AI”. What we have is LLMs, which are probabilistic generators. It’s anybody’s guess what you’re going to get when you use a LLM and they’re more likely to introduce mistakes rather than eliminate them.
The comparison to looms is incorrect. LLMs can be useful but I’m a completely different way. They shine when used to augment the work of a human expert but they can’t be trusted to perform alone.
So yeah, right now attempting to use a LLM exclusively leads to a drop in quality.
“They shine when used to augment the work of a human expert but they can’t be trusted to perform…”.
I’m sure someone wrote the same about the first looms.
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.
Another option is rocket language. It seems to be a lot focused on developing conversational skills. It’s is paid but not subscription which I’m a fan of. You just buy the language you want. The first few lessons of a language are free if you want to try it. I’m test running it right now to start my switch away from Duolingo
To add to the list of resources:
Todaku Books offer leveled difficulty, so even if you are starting out with Japanese there is something for you to read. The books are Creative Commons licensed, so don’t pay for them if you don’t want to.
