Jeff Benner
Lana SinapayenWow, Duolingo fired their translators to replace them by AI generated content. I thought they cared about language and communication! A lot of their courses are irreplaceable, the languages are not available in any other app and some real native people have made content for some of the endangered languages.
The funny thing is, if they truly believe this is a perfect fit for AI, it follows that duolingo believes it itself is obsolete: why would your users learn any language when they can instead use automated translation?
webhat
flisk š³ļøāš@lana because babelfishes don't exist yet. it isn't currently practical to just use translators everywhere. a lot of social interactions simply don't work when you have to make someone wait for you to translate what they said.
MinnĆ Pandora@lana actually, with this reasoning, not only Duolingo is obsolete, but so is human species. Why should we not gracefully get fired from humanity so we can get replaced by flawless AIs and please the Capital?
Zekovski š§£@lana
Maybe have a look at @librelingo ?
It's a free (as in freedom) language learning thingy. There's not much yet but people can participate. And in the end it'll be everyone's property, not like with Duolingo.
Maybe have a look at @librelingo ?
It's a free (as in freedom) language learning thingy. There's not much yet but people can participate. And in the end it'll be everyone's property, not like with Duolingo.
pancake š±š„@lana because learning a language is something more than just a translation? There are automatic translators available for years, even voice assisted, but that will never replace the way your brain adapts, experiences and feels when constructing sentences in a different way and learning other cultures. Languages are not tools
Lana Sinapayen (@[email protected])
@[email protected] I don't know how reputable this website is but it has a link to the reddit post where I first saw the info, and a screenshot of the firing email https://digialps.com/duolingos-massive-layoff-ai-takeover-impacting-thousands-of-human-translators/?amp=1
Miroslav SuchĆ½
Andrea Magnorsky š¹ š¦
Glen Malley@lana this whole culture of "anything to please shareholders" is so self destructive and unsustainable it's almost laughable if it weren't so depressing.
adamcrussell@glen_malley @lana Yes, and you just know that somewhere in the C-Suite someone came up with the challenge of "how can we use AI to improve profits?" and the best answer they could come up with was fire people.
@adamcrussell @lana consulting firms' first recommendation is almost always "cut costs by firing people". Might as well be boilerplate in the report template.
@glen_malley @lana it isn't like I am anti-automation. to some extent that's inevitable. but if your product is based on creating engaging culturally relevant content are the human creators of that content really the first ones to be cut to save money!?!? seems ridiculous!
fuegon@glen_malley @adamcrussell @lana that's part of the consulting firms job. You can blame them for the firings. The company didn't want to fire them, but the firm said they should so they had no choice
Keiji Case š¦š¦šš@glen_malley @adamcrussell @lana This is why consulting firms are hired: to take the blame for people losing jobs instead of executives because executives can just point at the firm report instead of the executives being let go for mismanagement. The firmās primary purpose is not to make company culture mottos and graphics everyone will forget in a year
Frank Bennett šÆšµ@lana Well, that's the end of that service. We're going to need an extinction monitor for online services in 2024. Sign of the times.
Sarah Fackrell@lana Wait, what? Do you happen to have a link handy so I can learn more? I tried googling but didn't get much (probably due to AI....)
@design_law I don't know how reputable this website is but it has a link to the reddit post where I first saw the info, and a screenshot of the firing email
https://digialps.com/duolingos-massive-layoff-ai-takeover-impacting-thousands-of-human-translators/?amp=1
https://digialps.com/duolingos-massive-layoff-ai-takeover-impacting-thousands-of-human-translators/?amp=1
@lana Thanks. I'm really hoping it's not true. I love Duo. But I've seen what AI did to Google Translate and I'm not interested in continuing with Duo if that's the road they're going down.
Mark Burton
Weltschmerz Ć Gogo
Neil@ThatWeltschmerz @markhburton @lana @design_law I saw this the day after subscribing. I got a refund.
@gneilyo @ThatWeltschmerz @lana @design_law
Cancelled mine too. Payment wasn't due for 3 days so saved Ā£54 and was able to give reason:
"Duolingo's replacement of human translators with bots. I will not support the firm's profits."
#duolingo #AI
Cancelled mine too. Payment wasn't due for 3 days so saved Ā£54 and was able to give reason:
"Duolingo's replacement of human translators with bots. I will not support the firm's profits."
#duolingo #AI
i.grok@markhburton sadly I didn't find out until I'd already paid them
I've cancelled so it won't renew but they successfully fooled me for 2024
I AmAnita@design_law @markhburton @lana I subscribe because the app makes trying to learn a difficult language fun. I am however getting a little suspicious now as Dewi Lingo keeps being killed by Owenās parsnips and Sioned has been arrested #duolingo #welsh #cymraeg
David Erik NelsonšŖ¬@lana @design_law Itās funny (and this is in no way to say the article isnāt factual), but the article was clearly mostly written by AI. šš¤£šš¤
Gabriel Pettier@lana @design_law ironically this page seems to integrate automated translation of the content (supposedly AI based), and i had to revert to English because the French it served me just sounded off.
aelius@lana @design_law hm, this website is very likely fake and they're the only source.
The reddit post is from an account that has existed since ~2021, but has posted nothing except for this.
The reddit user does not bring evidence of massive layoffs- the image of the exit survey email doesn't tell us much. They mention they were a contractor for duolingo in another post.
I don't think there's much credibility here.
Anh Tran@lana @design_law I hope it's not true as well. The website looks like it was written by AI, ironically.
Klaudia (aka jinxx)@lana Interesting. Do you have a source for the info?
padraig@lana I was interested in going super with the years end offering. Well, now maybe Iād rather not and see where this is going
AwesumIndustrys@lana Jesus Christ, this AI trend is ruining fucking everything.
Kimi 
@lana As far as i know Duolingo has been using AI since many years ago š®
John Maxwell@lana That's impressively stupid, even by corporate decision standards.
Boots Chantilly@lana UGH UGH UGH.
@lana they were originally crowd sourced, which is why you see such things as Klingon and Esperanto. Then went with real translators, because the comments on their translations had many complaints about inconsistencies and errors. (So they turned off comments.)
AI isn't going to make things better, it will in all likelihood make it more difficult to correct the errors that creep into the model
mav 
@lana
Their first and generally only concern is money. Any assumption of altruism applied to them is unwise.
Their first and generally only concern is money. Any assumption of altruism applied to them is unwise.
David Nash@lana The Duolingo Latin course has always been much too short to be as useful as its courses for French, Spanish, etc., but it was at least a start (itās what got me interested in learning more about Latin in the first place). Now itās going to be useless: existing online translation tools for Latin, to or from anything else, are so bad that thereās no way itās going to get a decent content update. (After a few months with a decent Latin text like LLPSI, *youāll* be a better translator for it than the various āAIā services.)
@lana sad. i'll have to reconsider renewing my subscription, i suppose.
bartholin (war, war never changes arc)
Barbara Monaco@lana This could explain the increase in syntax and other errors I've seen lately. Very disappointing, Duolingo.
Rachel@lana I hate this timeline so much....
Joanna Holman@lana @MarkAsser thatās a bummer. Iāve been using duolingo to re-learn Indonesian. That should be an easier than most language to teach- thereās no tones, verb tenses or grammatical gender and it uses the same alphabet as English. The special thing about Indonesian is that words often have more narrow meanings than in English. The word for can (as in have permission) and can (as in have ability) are different words in Indonesian . The words for we (inclusive of the person youāre talking to) and we (not including the person youāre talking to) are different words. Thereās plenty more like that. I only know this because Iāve learned some of the language elsewhere before, itās often unclear on duolingo. The standard duolingo template theyāre slotting Indonesian into doesnāt work as well as something custom built. Using AI will absolutely worsen the problem of people confusing the Indonesians theyāre talking to
Octavia Con Amore 
Succubard's Library@lana As dubious in quality as their Japanese course was when I tried it a few years ago (it's my first language but I wanted to see what their course involved), machine translation for Japanese (to and from English, at least) is infinitely worse than that done by humans 
Machine translation *sometimes* works for single words, but once you hit a few words, it dives to rock-bottom reliability. Sentences? You'd be better off just intuiting meaning from whatever cisual context you have access to 
Milonga fina, the Hermit 
@OctaviaConAmore @lana Machine translation can't replace human translations, no matter the language. Yes, translating from english to spanish (can speak for this case because I speak both) is probably a lot more accurate on average than english to japanese, but even in those cases the translations can have some weird mistakes that a human with minimal knowledge of the two languages would never make
Jess@lana darn, i guess I'll have to move it from the "apps i keep on my phone to convince myself i'm smart but will never use" folder to the dumpster
rumi@lana duoling is a for profit ? omg
GerƤuschtasche
Dieu
Emma š±@lana Reading this makes me so sad š