Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI

jherazob@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 385 points –
Duolingo Fires Translators in Favor of AI
futurism.com

Duolingo is very much on the Enshittification path, seems like they fired a number of translators and have the rest just proofreading AI.

For the interested, here's the place where you can request your personal data and delete your account

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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.

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.

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.