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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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.
The circle of life continues, and literacy goes down. AI cannot proofread, it merely says “these letters usually go with these”. AI screws up, people get taught shit language, they use it, it gets used as training data, rinse and repeat.
Well language is a fluid thing. If more and more people get taught shit language, the language will change to match. We have far worse problems on this planet :)
I do think these AI companies grabbing what they can without giving anything back is a problem though. In my view content creators are a bit hypocritical too though. When Google scraped the internet verbatim (viewable in google cache) they didn’t mind because it gave them discoverability. Now they suddenly do care because they don’t benefit directly. Really, the stance should have been made earlier. But I do agree it should be stopped. Or content creators compensated.
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.
Assuming we take the Halo lore as a matter of fact and are not projecting human faults to the Covenant: I guess not really.
As soon as monarchs or religious leaders emerge it’s game over.
And I’d guess there will always be someone more rich than the other one and be in charge of something more resulting in something like a capitalist system.
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.”
Yeah I’m not surprised or angry about it, isn’t this basically what has always happened? Like at some point we had elevator operators, some company automated the elevator and now there are basically zero elevator operators.
This is just happening all the time, like when I was a kid every gas station had people working at the station. Nowdays most stations around me are completely without workers, it’s all self checkout (like supermarkets, McDonalds, etc).
You are right but the problem here is it’s happening all at once on several fields. It’s not just elevator operators, it’s anyone doing basic design tasks, writing, translating, voice narrating, and basic programming. And that’s a lot of jobs.
My career was as a copyeditor, so we were the canaries in the coal mine when it came to learning about “good enough.” First came the buyouts of anyone with any longevity, then the annual layoffs started (and continued for nearly 10 years) until editing was completely excised from the role and anyone remaining was just a pair of hands moving rectangles for several papers on any given night. Cancellations were less than we’d cost.
Thing is, there was a fairly long exit ramp for those of us smart enough to see the endgame (I was not among them, believing there’d always be sufficient demand for rigorously vetted and edited news to keep papers afloat).
This time around, we’re not even 14 months out from the public release of ChatGPT, and having used just the free model, its abilities do raise the question “why do we have someone doing this?” for a number of fields I’ve worked in. Layoffs are happening without warning caused by something not even on most people’s radars mid-2022, and there’s no way it slows down from here.
Couldn’t agree more, you make a point with the timeline. It’s changing too fast. And it’s not only ChatGPT but also image generation tools such as Midjourney. There are AI for 3D models too now, which I believe will be of industry standard quality in a year or two.
AI is a phenomenon of a similar weight as the Industrial Revolution, but its much faster development means a lot of people can’t keep up or change careers
Yet, unemployment in most of the western world is very low. That could change, of course. We’ll likely need universal basic income down the road. Or at least some very enhanced unemployment benefits.
It’s only been one year. I’d like to see how this topic aged in 2026. AI is developing at an unprecedented speed for a socioeconomic phenomenon of its calibre.
Edit: And yes we might need some kind of government support. What scares me is, where do you get the money to support such a large population?
where do you get the money to support such a large population?
AI supporters would tell you that productivity improvements made with AI tech will make that possible.
If you honestly believe this, I have a bridge in London to sell you.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Spanish or French and only if you speak English. Everything else might as well not exist.
That’s a bit over the top, in my opinion. I’ve tried plenty of courses, and Duolingo is pretty good to get a hang of the basics of a language.
I’d say, in my experience, the hardest part of learning a language is getting started, and I feel Duolingo is perfect just for that. To get deeper knowledge and become more comfortable, one should probably switch once they start feeling more comfortable with the alphabet (if there is a specific one), and with the basic vocabulary and grammar.
EDIT: Forgot to add but another advantage of Duolingo, is that it’s also great to get a taste and basic feel for different languages; and that can be especially useful for someone who is looking to learn a new language but can’t quite decide on one.
Been using a multifaceted approach to cramming Italian in my little brain:
- Anki flashcards (this is my main thing)
- conversational pod casts
- movies, shows and music
- lastly, Duolingo
Any suggestions on what I could be using instead of Duolingo?
The podcasts and other media consumption will probably be what most benefit you in the long term, and something like Anki and Duolingo I think are good complements for that.
Any alternatives to Duolingo that I think would be worth replacing it, would have to be something that is more focused on the specific language that you are learning, i.e. Nicos Weg for German (and I don’t personally know any for Italian, sorry). Most other general language learning websites/apps would probably be running into the same issues and limitations as Duo, and which one to use depends most on personal preference; however, there is one I’ve heard of called Italki (there may be more) which basically acts as a language exchange app, where you connect talk to people who natively speak the language you are learning, and they can give you input. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve heard good things.
Other than that, you have certified online/in person courses, but obviously those are not as convenient as Duo, and they cost money (probably significantly more than even a Duo subscription).
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention, but one thing which I personally enjoy is looking up and trying to read children’s books; and I mean like “90% picture & 10% text” books which are made for parents to read to their very young kids. And as you get more comfortable, try finding and reading increasingly harder books/stories online.
I notice Duolingo is your only form of output. Is that a conscious decision? Otherwise I’d second the recommendation for something involving speaking to someone with the patience to, or who agrees to, have a conversation with you.
Yeah, it is at the moment for the most part. My girlfriend is fluent in Spanish, and I have talked to her about general concepts that overlap.
We decided after I started getting deeper into the language that we should maybe not do that as much so I don’t pick up bad or flat out wrong habits.
I myself am of an Italian descent, however the relatives I have that speak it either live in Italy still and are estranged or sadly have passed away. There is an Italian grocery store near me, and I have heard them speaking it so I was hoping to strike a couple friendships up over time there.
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.
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.
I just got free streak freezes 11 days ago.
So perhaps it’s regional.
What other platform is available?
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…
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.
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.
Awesome, I think I may go back to a language myself. Thanks for checking it out and letting us know!
They also use AI.
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
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.
You definetely do not need to study an hour every day to make progress.Otherwise everyone learning a second or third language in school would be entirely fucked. For me personally the gamification has helped a lot with learning the basic concepts and words of a language.
If you want to get to the level of a native speaker of course no app can do that and i guess somewhere around B1/B2 you need to use the language in a real setting like you said.
While technically you don’t need to study an hour every day, if you don’t put that much time into it you will eventually look back and see you have spend a year+ and don’t know anything and then give up. An hour a day means it is likely you have made progress between reviews of your life and thus the effort is worth continuing. At 10 minutes per day you will be dead before you know the language, so giving up is the right answer.
Enough people fail to learn a language in school as to consider the whole idea of school bunk. (but some do learn, and some schools are better than others - but the better ones all feature time as a factor)
I’ve found Babble to be okay
Do you mean Babbel? Hadn’t heard of it, will keep it in mind
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.
Yup, that’s the one
“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.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.
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 their 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.
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 need some more copium. Not Again :'(
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
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.
Clozemaster!
Coming from Duolingo I found it a bit overwhelming. I tried one collection, but as I already know Spanish a bit, it was too easy. Any tips?
I wasn’t quite sure what to think about this, so I’ve asked my local LLM. Seems it is fine.
Holy shit it’s on the money
It generally doesn’t have a high opinion of translators (note that the emojis here are inserted as path markers to help with prompt debugging - but everyting else is from the LLM):
lmao what’s wrong with your llama
…soon to come to your favorite corporation’s C suite’s Windows 11 desktop’s Copilot assistant for empowering the synergies of staying relevant in a high stakes market environment.
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?
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
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?
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.
