Duolingo Announces Plans to Replace as Many Human Workers as Possible With AI

Don't do it, Duolingo.

Pivot Power

The gamified, owl-mascoted language learning app Duolingo is completing its "AI-first" pivot — and replacing all its human contractors along the way.

In an all-hands email that was later posted on LinkedIn, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announced that the company would "gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle."

Part of that shift, von Ahn wrote, will involve deploying the tech before it’s "100 percent perfect."

"We're not going to rebuild everything overnight, and some things — like getting Al to understand our codebase-will take time," the CEO wrote. "However, we can't wait until the technology is 100% perfect. We'd rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment."

Along with "gradually" offloading all its human contractors, Duolingo will also, per von Ahn’s timeline, use knowledge of AI when hiring and in performance reviews.

Slow Fork

Folks online have found the language app’s shift towards AI pretty duo-plicitious — especially because Duolingo has been using AI for years now. As one user on the r/Technology subreddit noted, Duolingo already appears to use "AI pronunciations for Irish" and "sacked the contractor" or contractors that built it out.

That user isn't the first to make that claim — two years ago, folks on the Duolingo subreddit pointed out that the voices for Irish (the term folks in Ireland and its diaspora use for Gaelic) seemed to be "computer generated" and, basically, crappy. A few months later, a company spokesperson confirmed that translators had indeed been fired in favor of AI.

Over on Bluesky, sentiments were similar.

"The best time to delete Duolingo was when they first included AI shit," one user quipped. "The second best time is now."

With news of the app pivoting even further in favor of AI, there is a good case to be made that Duolingo’s gamified model was never really that helpful for language learning to begin with.

"Last year I replaced Duolingo with actual studying," another Bluesky-er posted, "and you can too."

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