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.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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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?
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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
What could be possibly go wrong?
I need some more copium. Not Again :'(
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
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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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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.