Duolingo-Double-Down

I'm sure you've heard the news, Duolingo has decided that it will cease to hire people for jobs it needs doing if AI can do it for them. This means that all lessons will be graded, evaluated and improved using Artificial Intelligence for all aspects of it's user experience.

What happened? Why is this App, which was one of the best in the business, sudden nothing more than a load of cow dung that playfully threatens to kill you if you don't do a lesson?

As a long term user, I can say that this has been happening for a LONG time now. And the term I will use to explain it is this, enshittification.

Now, enshittification is a real word that is described as the slow decline of a service to the point of unusability. We've seen this with many items within our lives, usually technology such as software and programs where the services we pay for (or use for free, such is the case for Duolingo) slow decline in quality. I remember when Duolingo was actually useful, explaining and giving answers to what you were doing wrong. When you got questions wrong and ran out of hearts, you could refill them by practicing. Now everything is adverts, and they want you to use all your diamonds so you have to buy them or buy the super package. Something I will never do.

You see, what has happened with the enshittification of Duolingo is that they have removed the human aspect to their service. You don't have to be a linguistic graduate to know that the whole point of language is to communicate with your fellow humans, and the removal of this shows that they are only thinking about the game rather than the educational material. We all knew that Duolingo was the gamification of language(1), but now it's just the Temu of language. Poor quality with poor usability.

The CEO has recently doubled down on his comments, saying that AI will be a better teacher of language than any human teacher, showing that he isn't actually in it for humanity.

Where did all this AI dreaming come from? Why are we so attracted to removing anything to do with community? The idea that Duolingo or any language platform would be better if left to an Artifical Intelligence is just crap! But it's not alone, nearly all companies have removed people as a cheap replacement to employees, even if the whole point of their business is humanitarian. Banks removing people in their phone calls, customer services being replaced with fake voices. Even adverts are clearly AI, even the ones that litter Duolingo.

I think what we've stumbled across is the natural progression of capitalism, which arguably started as a way to improve services through competition but became a sedative. Duolingo does not care about you learning a language or gaining knowledge or skills in what they offer, they only care about you buying their service. It's all about streamlining that cash to the shareholders over any actual product, and Duolingo does not have a product anymore.

It's stupid and irresponsible for a someone in an educational(2) platform to say that artificial intelligence is somehow superior to teachers, because an app cannot teach you everything. And if we've noticed anything in the last few years, the management of this failing app has shown only complete negligence to their product. Teachers and first hand experience will always outlive it, and it cannot give you an actual understanding of the cultures that the tongues come from.

That's another point, this app is the most superficial way to look at a language. It teaches you the grammar, but not the phrases and logic that comes with the language. The AI understands where to put the words, but not the history or the uses of them. "In bocca del lupo" is Good luck in Italian, could AI tell you why?

NO!

Of Course not! And people know this with google coming up with phrases like they are common knowledge because someone asked what it meant(3)!

I've just came out of Hospital and am really struggling to write this, so I'm just going to leave it here. But I'm ready to call myself a Neo-luddite, because this world is sleepwalking to a death of any form of actual skill, and it's happening because some rich dick wants to make a quick quid off something we are hardwired to want to learn.

(1) Which is a fair arguement for a bad learning platform, but does encourage revisiting what you've done. Say what you want about gamification, I think it works well to help solidify the knowledge you've gained.

(2) I mean this in a very loose way now, but also Duolingo should not be the only way you learn a language. Other ways like face to face lessons. Duolingo was great for revision, but even now that is under scrutiny.

(3) https://futurism.com/google-ai-overviews-fake-idioms You can't lick a badger twice.