Duolingo has had a number of amazing campaigns and strategies, from killing off their own mascot, to using social media to live rent free in the minds of many. But we aren’t here to talk about that. The app has made one simple wrong move that has caused its 13% drop in app downloads in just one month.
By announcing a new major strategic switch for the learning app, doubling its number of language courses, including boosting its Japanese learning by making it available in all 28 of Duolingo’s interface languages. All sounds great right?
Unfortunately, these new changes come at the cost of replacing 10% of their contractors with AI at the end of 2023, and now announcing that these 148 new courses were created using generative AI.
They announced this with an email from their CEO on LinkedIn with this caption:
👇🏽 Below is an all-hands email from our CEO, Luis von Ahn – we are going to be AI-first.
Just like how betting on mobile in 2012 made all the difference, we’re making a similar call now. This time the platform shift is AI.
What doesn’t change: We will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees.
While it states in this post that it will stay a company that cares deeply about its employees, this doesn’t track well with the 10% of its ‘deeply cared about’ employees who lost their jobs due to AI. Especially in openly admitting to gradually stop using contractors and to use AI in hiring and performance reviewing.
One person affected by the layoffs in 2023 went to Reddit and wrote:
“The reason [Duolingo] gave is that AI can come up with content and translations, alternative translations, and pretty much anything else translators did. They kept a couple people on each team and call them content curators. They simply check the AI crap that gets produced and then push it through,” (Reddit account now deleted).
This firing of contractors shows that they have been using AI without mentioning of it since 2023, and that caused losing 10% of their workforce, we can only imagine how many will lose their jobs now they have moved to become ‘AI-first’.
This announcement has had a striking number of concerns and comments of people losing their streaks of thousands due to choosing to delete the app. One commenter stated:
“Mind you, this is the same Duolingo who relied on human humour to grow their social media presence. Language is the most human trait and it’s being replaced by AI?”
In amongst a sphere of AI hate and many people boycotting any use of AI, it is very tone-deaf of this CEO to now replace many of its functions with generative AI.
“Developing our first 100 courses took about 12 years, and now, in about a year, we’re able to create and launch nearly 150 new courses.”
Luis von Ahn stated in a press release.
This just shows that von Ahn is taking quantity over quality, which seems to already be causing a storm.
Languages are the forefront of culture, speaking is one of the most human things we do, learning languages is supposed to be a homage to millennia of complexities within cultures across the world. Turning something that is supposed to represent something with so much humanity behind it into a faceless, emotionless machine by using AI is openly disrespectful to many generations of people worldwide.
Generative AI is known for being incorrect, glitching and ‘hallucinating’ which has been reportedly getting worse. More recent releases of AI tools by OpenAI and DeepSeek have been producing even higher rates of hallucinations — false information created by false reasoning —presenting challenges for companies using these tools. According to company tests, Open Ai’s newest 03 and 04-mini have hallucinated 30-50% of the time.
With these statistics, who can trust generative AI for simple information, let alone teaching a whole language.
Someone took to X (formally known as Twitter) to say there’s been a huge decrease in quality since the switch to AI as “AI translates word-by-word, while employees (correctly) translate by recreating meaning within the confines of grammar rules.”
The move to AI is bad enough, but the lack of care from the CEO is an outright PR nightmare. Facing the backlash with a careless attitude, doubling down on the plan to slowly replace contractors and potential employees with AI due to the investment they’ve already made.
I know I won’t be using Duolingo anymore, will you?
Influence, Inc. 