From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
A lot of people have responded to my Duolingo post with things like "Never work for free," and "I would never donate my time to a corporation.” Which I completely agree with.
But here's the thing about Duolingo and all of the other companies like it. You already work for them. You just don’t know it.
On Duo, I thought I was learning a language. Participating in the community by helping other learners and building resources seemed like part of the process.
Luis Von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, was one of the creators of CAPTCHA, which was originally supposed to stop bot spam by getting a human to do a task a machine couldn’t do. In 2009 Google bought CAPTCHA and used it to get humans to proofread the books they were digitising (without permission from the authors of those books btw). So in order to access much of the web, people had to work for Google. Most of them didn’t know they were working for Google - they thought they were visiting websites.
This is how they get you. They make it seem like they’re giving you something valuable (access to a website, tools to learn a language), while they’re actually taking something from you (your skills, your time, your knowledge, your labour). They make you think they’re helping you, but really you're helping them (and they’re serving you ads while you do it).
Maybe if people had known what CAPTCHA was really for they would’ve done it anyway. Maybe I still would’ve done all that work for Duo if I’d known it would one day disappear from the web and become training data for an LLM ...
... Or maybe I would’ve proofread books for Project Gutenberg, or donated my time to citizen science projects, or worked on an accessibility app, or a million other things which genuinely improve people’s lives and the quality of the web. I didn’t get an informed choice. I got lured into helping a tech company become profitable, while they made the internet a shittier place to be.
How many things are you doing on the web every day which are actually hidden work for tech companies? Probably dozens, or hundreds. We all are. That’s why this is so insidious. It’s everywhere. The tech industry is built on free labour. (And not just free – we often end up paying for the end results of our own work, delivered back to us in garbled, enshittified form).
And it’s a problem that’s only getting worse with AI. Is that thoughtful answer you gave someone on reddit or Mastodon something that will stay on the web for years, helping people in future with the same problem? Or is it just grist for the LLMs?
Cher gens du #mastodon. Je cherche unE personne pour pratiquer parler #français. J’ai appris avec la chouette #duolingo 🦉depuis deux ans, mais ne peux jamais parler. Ça m’intéresse dans les #artes, #scifi, #societe, les #animaux et plus des choses. Nous pourrions recontrer deux fois par mois en ligne, si tu veux. Allons-y #apprender#langues#tandem! 😀 Je peux parle #anglais ou #allemand avec toi. 😊
-This is so cool and helpful!
-I’m learning so quickly!
-I can share my progress with friends! 🥰
-I’m so obsessed with my streak haha!
-I want to punt this stupid owl into the centre of the sun
I ended my time on Duolingo in the #NewYear, after finding out they sacked a bunch of translators and are now relying on AI to generate sentences for learning. Essentially, they are just generating the content via AI and having a limited number of translators "check the work" before putting it up into their programs.
I also noticed that, the longer I went on in my Duolingo program, the quality of the learning seemed to decrease dramatically, and after learning about the AI thing, it started to dawn on me that this could be part of the reason for that. But even if it isn't related, the fact that they are making this move toward AI only means in the future, the learning WILL decrease in quality whether we like it or not, and that's no fun at all.
So No Thanks, #Duolingo. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
The gallop towards #enshittification as propounded by @pluralistic continues unabated. This time with Duolingo. I've been using the app for years. In fact almost straight for the past 180 days. Then their recent update removed the clear, well articulated speech & replaced it with what seems to be AI generated, barely comprehensible, low quality speech that effectively makes the app (now shapp/shit app) pretty much unusable.
If you're a Duolingo user or just a lover of language in general & if you've noticed this please file regular reports about the sound quality & add a comment. Become ungovernable.
"Duolingo is the latest company to cite AI as a reason for job cuts. The company confirmed it cut around 10% of its contractor workforce at the end of 2023, as it turns to AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 to streamline content production and translations."
Aujourd'hui, après 3 ans et demi de pratique quotidienne, j'ai supprimé mon compte #duolingo .
Pourtant je l'ai aimée d'amour cette chouette.
Mais virer les gens pour les remplacer par des IA, c'est la goutte d'enshittification qui fait déborder le vase. Yavait déjà bien assez de trucs craignos, notamment l'invisibilisation du travail des volontaires qui ont littéralement fait cette plate-forme, et bien sûr une accélération de la merde depuis l'entrée en bourse en 2021. Allez voir le hashtag #duolingo pour les détails.
Je juge pas les gens qui restent dessus. Je sais qu'on a pas toujours le choix.
Si vous décidez de vous barrer, il ne suffit pas de désinstaller l'appli ou de cesser de l'utiliser : pensez à supprimer votre compte, c'est la seule manière pour que ces connards cotés en bourse ne puissent pas vous compter dans leurs stats d'utilisateurs. Accessoirement ça supprime toutes vos données chez eux aussi.
Quelqu'un a rassemblé des alternatives ici (en anglais) https://www.tumblr.com/ruhua-langblr/739086003139149824/duolingo-sucks-now-what-a-guide , si vous en avez d'autres n'hésitez pas à les partager.
Thinking about how #duolingo is just dropping courses for less "commercial" languages for example #esperanto despite their popularity and that these courses are largely built for free by volunteer enthusiasts.
Perhaps there is an opening here for an #opensource platform for building and consuming language courses that can be hosted cheaply and can exist as long as people want them. Doesn't necessarily need to be a straight Duolingo clone.
Learning Italian with #Duolingo went to check on a word in #Googletranslate, and it's completely different, so either Duolingo's wrong or Googles AI is rubbish, I suspect the latter.
Whelp. I'm leaving #Duolingo today (666 days). It's been coming for a while (for-profit was never a good fit) but the AI degradations are the final straw. The value proposition is untenable. I'm starting Linguistica in the interim and I'll diversity my lessons (Italian/German) but if y'all have suggestions of good NP language learning apps or collectives, I need the recs. Thanks.
Just told my family I won't be renewing our DuoLingo family subscription because I won't support their replacement of actual human workers with "AI". This explains why their quality has been declining.
I reported a few erroneous answer rejections and DuoLingo emailed that they've accepted one report as correct, but it's not my job to fix their increasingly poor software and I won't support their drive to maximize profits at all costs.
I'm getting disheartened by Duolingo. I've done a little free version Welsh everyday for six months, enjoyed it. Suddenly they decided to 'push' their sign-up advert so hard, that it's sign up or give up on Duolingo.. I know I need more speaking practise, that will come after I've got understanding, reading, spelling, pronunciation under my belt a bit. I had considered signing up until they pushed so hard. Maybe I'm just an ornery person who won't be pushed. #Duolingo#Fediverse#Mastodon
Das Projekt "Have I Been Pwned" hat der ohnehin umfangreichen Sammlung von Datenlecks weitere 2,6 Millionen Datensätze hinzugefügt, die beim Sprachenlern-Dienstleister #Duolingo entwendet wurden. 😱
Ok, I knew about "Schadenfreude", but I didn't realise that the #German words "sturmfrei", "Erklärungsnot", "Zugzwang", "Fremdschämen" and "Bescherung" have no direct equivalents in English (and possibly in other languages). My two favourites mentioned in the article are "Eselsbrücke" (donkey bridge) and "Kopfkino" (head cinema). 😀
Salut,
Dans un projet de me remettre à l' #allemand en mode DIY j'envisage la réinstallation de #Duolingo sur mon tél mais avez vous des applis/méthodes/autres qui pourraient faire le taf ?
Des conseils de trucs à lire/écouter/regarder ?
Merci