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Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content

245 points by leotravis10 3y ago

leotravis10 3y ago
https://archive.ph/8Nq7u https://archive.ph/8Nq7u
minimaxir 3y ago
The tweet that made the layoff news go viral: https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1744234385891594380 https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1744234385891594380
- malfist 3y ago
  Wow, so the layoff notice to contractors was "Thank you for working at Duolingo, here's an exit survey"? That's cold.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    "It looks like you missed you Duolingo lesson again, you know what happens now..."
  - laweijfmvo 3y ago
    Probably the official notice came from their contracting agency.
viburnum 3y ago
I cancelled my subscription last year because the quality had gone down, and the UI changes kept getting worse.
- skinkestek 3y ago
  For everyone who wonder what the quality is like: it is impossible -even for native speakers - to pronounce certain words and in particular numbers I think in a way that makes duolingo accept them. This seems to be true for more than one language (think I have heard / read about it from both a Norwegian testing Norwegian and a Ukrainian testing Ukrainian language.
  - ttmb 3y ago
    At the same time, it also seems to accept unintelligible grunting as a correct pronunciation for many questions, and not just German.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Duolingo is actually a great usecase for AI. It doesn't teach you a language in any meaningful sense, but is a fun side activity to practice. AI is great for apps like these.
z_open 3y ago
The machine generated content was already bad. I don't know if this AI transition will make it better or worse but I swear Duolingo was among the worst of apps I tried. People say it's ok to use supplementary when you have a 10 or 15 minute break but I think sentence mining or watching YouTube videos with subtitles is a better use of those minutes. I avoid telling giving this advice to people in real life because it seems dismissive of the time they are spending.
- jjeaff 3y ago
  I realize lots of people have learned languages by watching movies in the target language and reading subtitles in their native language, but I have found that to be highly difficult. I guess everyone is different, but given that the vast majority of people who read something while listening to something else will either comprehend something from one and nothing from the other, or worst case, get nothing from either, it seems likely that doing so to learn a language is not optimum. I could perhaps see this method as more effective in cases where the 2 languages are similar enough that there is some "lining up" between what you read and hear, but where the words are completely dissimilar and even sentence structure is completely different, I just don't see it as any better than a brute force method of learning.
  - z_open 3y ago
    In my opinion, watching movies is ineffective until you can read the subtitles in the target language. This is at the B1/B2 level. Before that you're just focusing on the native language. Once you hit the B levels, things get easier. But it's uphill until then and tutors or courses are your best bet to get there.
    - Doxin 3y ago
      You've got it the wrong way around there. The spoken language should be the language you're trying to learn, the subtitles should be in your native language. Of course that'll not help you learn to read a foreign language.
  - 3y ago
vouaobrasil 3y ago
Such a large part of making lifelong connections in this world are from hiring people who you need to make something work. I made some wonderful connections in my previous jobs that I never would have otherwise if they could do everything themselves with AI or if I could do everything myself without them. The fact is, automation can make life better but beyond a certain point, if hardly anyone needs anyone else, then all those wonderful connections of working together vanish. We can stil make those connections theoretically, but the lack of needing someone else removes the actuality and genuineness of the process. I wish that everyone who created AI and who welcomes it would think about this longer-time societal impact before becoming blinded with its immediate appeal. Sorry to say but I think making AI in general is one of the biggest mistakes we ever made.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  This is not really related to AI though? A company that was before 400 people, can now be 200 people. But people will rarely make meaningful bonds outside of those 5 people closest to them (Dunbar's number).
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    This is such an engineer's perspective. The point is, it is not just the number of connections, but the type of connection: diversity will be removed, since you only really need certain skillsets. The people with design skills and other types of skills will be removed. This numerical accounting perspective so widespread with engineers and computer scientists is the sort of reasoning that is bringing us to disaster.
  - redcobra762 3y ago
    Dunbar’s Number is most commonly set at around 150, not 5.
    - madsbuch 3y ago
      Dunbar is also talking about his layers of emotional closeness, where 5 is the innermost layer.
madsbuch 3y ago
I am learning Polish, and find that ChatGPT provides a much better tutor than any human. Ie. I would rather use ChatGPT than a human tutor, indifferent to the price. I am also developing my own app to learn languages, and I can get to Duolingo levels in roughly a weekend worth of side project. I project that a certain category of apps will die off really fast.
- dralley 3y ago
  How do you know for certain that you're not being taught by a confidently incorrect tutor?
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    You never actually know that, and most people are. That's why there's so much "nous" use in French classes and so little "on" and so on. But the learn rate is so fast, that you get sufficient coverage to fix it up in actual conversation. My wife and I did a combo of another AI product (https://www.speak.com/ https://www.speak.com/) and ChatGPT to learn sufficient Spanish to get by in Chilean Patagonia and it did a pretty decent job (we just learned pronunciation through mimicry). We're not experts as a result, obviously, but it helped us get around and stuff which is fun. It was pretty much a crash course started as we were landing in Santiago (which is where we entered the country).
    - madsbuch 3y ago
      > But the learn rate is so fast, that you get sufficient coverage to fix it up in actual conversation. This should really be emphasised. Correctness might not be entirely on every time. But learning pace and engagement is so much higher, that it more than makes up for it. Especially engagement is a point where ChatGPT wins over all human teachers.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    I know that as well as with any human tutor. The main difference is that I am motivated to check the answer, eg. by asking the woman who is my main reason to learn Polish. Also, the value of a tutor that in and encouraging way corrects my verb conjugation of być (to be) for the 500th time has a lot more value than the risk of it being wrong on a corner case. A human tutor would semi-arrogantly have told be off and asked me to look at the dictionary (Yes, I have studied English, German, Spanish, and French in school, I have had more language teacher than anything else)
codetrotter 3y ago
If Duolingo wanted to invent a new word it is probable IMO that they would be able to introduce and popularize it, in spite of no one else having ever thought of that word. For example, if Duolingo wanted to invent “schmibbidibbi” as a word, they could give it a definition and start using it in their material. Pretty soon people would start using the word IRL. I wonder if there will ever be any words invented by AI that Duolingo accidentally teaches the world, which did initially not exist outside of the Duolingo app.
- jkaptur 3y ago
  What an amazing choice of new word - it's "Generation Alpha's first foray into internet culture" https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    schmibbidibbi is clearly a distinct word, different from skibidi. But also near enough that conceivably an AI could invent the word schmibbidibbi if it knew skibidi. Depending on how it tokenizes words.
- ikesau 3y ago
  that's an interesting idea, but I dunno if "language learners" comprise a sufficiently influential cultural group to influence language in this way. If I learned a new word through duolingo, used it while speaking to native speakers of the language, and no one knew what it meant, I probably would be embarrassed and confused and not use the word again. But maybe it'll happen! And along that line, I wonder if advanced language models will be able to identify "missing words" that we're lacking to discuss concepts that we haven't yet conceptualized.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    The trick is to teach French learners that this word means something in French and at the same time to teach English learners that it means something in English. So you travel to France and practice your newly-learned French. You run across a French person who has been learning English. You use the word thinking that it’s French, and the person you speak to has already heard it as an English word and thinks that you don’t know the word in French but they know what you mean thinking it’s an English word.
helloericsf 3y ago
Which AI services does Duolingo use for the translations? It seems like they're satisfied with the outcome. Curious about the cost of the AI service as well.
- data-ottawa 3y ago
  OpenAI's GPT4 https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/ https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/
  - thorum 3y ago
    My experience is that GPT-4 is quite good at most languages, including hard ones like Chinese - especially when paired with a “verification” step, where you copy something it wrote and start a new session and ask, “Is this sentence well-written <language>?” It has a surprisingly deep understanding of nuance and context. You can copy some Chinese text that Google Translate completely fails to translate, paste it into GPT-4 and ask “Please explain this text including any nuanced meaning that a foreigner would miss“ and get a detailed, coherent explanation.
dappermanneke 3y ago
it’s been going down in quality as an actual teaching aid for a while, beyond maybe sentence structure memorisation, so it’s sad to see this accelerate further
ttmb 3y ago
Wasn't one of their initial monetization ideas that crowdsourced translations - from amateurs, not even paid contractors - would outperform AI translation? The translation thing never came close to panning out, from what I can tell. Back in the day you used to be able to see a mini discussion thread about any exercise. The comments in these threads - from unpaid users - were frequently much more helpful than the official teaching notes. But they got rid of those a while back, too. At the time people suggested it was because they wanted to push people into some sort of paid tutoring offering that they'd announced. But I don't see any hint of that around. Now I'd guess it's because the questions are no longer hand crafted by people, and are now autogenerated by AI, leading to an inability to have discussions about specific questions.
- Nadya 3y ago
  This seems to be a scaling issue for all of these online language/SRS learning systems. Every single one of them scales and then starts dialing back/deleting/hiding all of the user-generated content that helped the platform get to where it is today. Almost a decade ago "smart.fm" was a thing and the best thing about it was all of the user-generated content (blogs) offering discussions and explanations for so many various languages. From grammatical concepts being explained to people asking questions and having users provide answers in public Q&A style format. Then smart.fm got rid of all of that and became "iknow.jp" and deleted everyone's blogs and hard work built to create the smart.fm community (many of whom then moved to Memrise). Memrise was originally about using user-submitted mnemonics and it had a vast library of them being created. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, none of the mnemonics are around anymore and they're no longer the focus. The focus is on monetization and gamification of their Pro user stats (of which I have lifetime membership until the year 9999 due to my help/work during their Beta testing years). Because mnemonics were the focus - words across all of their courses had to be combined so that the mnemonics between courses would carry over. Myself and a number of (unpaid) volunteers spent months combining all of the words for every popularly used language (I helped with the Japanese dictionary) across all existing courses at that time. Hosting (and moderating) user-generated content is an issue at scale. At the start when you have mostly good faith actors and few trolls it works quite well. But after a certain scale moderation becomes a massive issue. At least I got a cool staff-only T-shirts out of it. Ben is an awesome dude and when I donated to the Memrise bus tour godfundme I asked if I could have one of their staff shirts that I knew they had - and they actually sent me one instead of one of the bus tour shirts! The better funded of these sites seem to last a bit longer/scale a bit larger but it seems the death of user-generated content is inevitable after a certain point.
charcircuit 3y ago
There isn't really a need for human translators in language learning. Machine translation is good enough at translating into one's one native language and the translation quality doesn't really matter as you already know your native language.
- vintermann 3y ago
  I don't want it to translate to my native language. We happened to have a teacher who was an old Esperantist with some quirky ideas, so I learned English with the so-called direct method. That means that after the first class, the teacher and everyone spoke only English in class. The textbook relied heavily on pictures. Lots of people don't like the direct method, and I can understand why it's unpleasant, but it worked really well for me. I had German lessons in school for a long time, but never gained anything like the fluency I got in English - the German teachers varied from some very archaic grammar-translation stuff ("durchfürgegenohneum", "ausbeimitnachseitvonzu" etc.) to the ones who seemed to have no plan at all. LLMs should be able to teach me with the direct method, though fine-tuning would help.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > the German teachers varied from some very archaic grammar-translation stuff ("durchfürgegenohneum", "ausbeimitnachseitvonzu" etc.) to the ones who seemed to have no plan at all. Native German speaker here: such grammatical structures are really how I think about my mother tongue, thus I do believe these are good exercises: always have the grammar tree in the back of your mind when you speak German "and then speak this grammar tree". :-) In opposite to English, in German grammar is quite important.
    - vintermann 3y ago
      Maybe it's how you think about it today, but it's not how you learned it, and it wasn't a way I succeeded at ever becoming fluent in it. Grammar is just as important in English, it just hides its complexity elsewhere.
vr46 3y ago
Duolingo should be on borrowed time, as a method to learn a language it’s inefficient to the point of being ineffective - it seems to serve as an acceptable reason for fiddling with one’s phone, like a Guilt-Eze pill. I spent 18 months on it and the learning was soundly thrashed by three weeks in a classroom, and for all the pupils, not just me, primed for success by 18 months with Duolingo. Unless anyone has had a different experience, Duolingo is an exercise in self-deception. No doubt there will be people in difficult situations that have managed just fine with Duolingo, or in spite of it, but it doesn’t feel like a growing market.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I feel like you’re saying “primed for success” ironically but I’m not seeing the irony.
  - i_am_jl 3y ago
    If they were actually primed for success then 18 months of Duolingo should've given them a significant head start on the other students. Judging by the tone, I'm assuming that didn't actually occur.
  - eterm 3y ago
    It took me a few times to understand their sentence correctly. What I think OP meant to say: All pupils found success. My success could be explained by being primed for success with 18 months of duolingo, but all pupils had similar success. As written, it reads like "all pupils [...] primed for success by duolingo" which is perhaps why you tried to look for irony to match it with their conclusion.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Hah ok. I’m amused.
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    Studying Duolingo for 18 months should have primed them for success, but after just three weeks of an in-person class, it was evident that it had not. It's implied (or assumed) that the class was for 2nd year students or less, so Duolingo must be less effective than traditional instruction.
partiallypro 3y ago
I coincidentally saw a video recently about how Duolingo's AI model was getting some French things wrong. I use Duolingo, but it's a vocab tool more than anything.
unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
LLMs are the masters of bilingual bullshit, so really Duolingo has no choice but embrace them. The LLM stuff embedded in their existing product is challenging in a different and better way.
graypegg 3y ago
Why would I use duolingo if it has about the same product as opening google translate, moving the target language side off the screen, typing in some inane sentence, guessing what it says, and revealing. You take a product that had the USP of “quality” and decided you’d rather play in the “AI sludge content” thunderdome where anyone with a vague understanding of web development and openAI api access can compete with you for functionally the same product.
- vintermann 3y ago
  Well, these days, Google Translate is pretty bad as machine translation services go... it's much better to ask an instruction tuned multilingual LLM to translate for you.
- ChadNauseam 3y ago
  > Why would I use duolingo if it has about the same product as opening google translate, moving the target language side off the screen, typing in some inane sentence, guessing what it says, and revealing. That seems like a way worse UX to me than what duolingo offers
  - graypegg 3y ago
    I wouldn’t say it’s exceptionally worse considering it’s free vs begging you for microtransactions. Gamification is easy enough on your own, get some ice cream! If you need accountability, ask a friend. You could alternatively fill up millions of flash cards in Anki with random phrases out of chatGPT and really hone in on the Duolingo simplicity. Silly examples, but I just feel like “AI phrases with TTS audio displayed along side 1 of 20 PNGs of a cartoon character” isn’t really a defendable product in a market that churns out multiple copies of that idea a month. They used to be a course that was designed by employees/volunteers interested in language (in theory), now it’s a randomized. Eh.
- attentive 3y ago
  Structure and progress.
pjmlp 3y ago
It is coming to all, including programming, just remember that.
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  Indeed. Cheer on the tech if you like, but don't be surprised when you're out of work for the foreseeable future next.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    "Ask not for whom the Paperclip Optimiser tolls, it tolls for thee."
surfingdino 3y ago
AI translation falls flat on its face with gendered languages, when it is given text in English and has to translate it into French, German, or Polish. How is that even a consideration for a service that's supposed to be teaching people languages?
- frabcus 3y ago
  Google Translate and DeepL are pretty bad at this, that's true. As far as I can tell they translate a sentence at a time. Using an LLM and giving more context, it can infer gender from signals earlier in the text. This based on testing we did at the last place I worked. What kind of cases do you have gender failing, with which tools?
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    > ... it can infer gender from signals earlier in the text Or even later in the text. Which is one of the great thing about transformers.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  Can you give an example of this? In my experience (learning Polish) ChatGPT can usually derive the gender when the subject is a common name: Sure, here are the translations of your sentences into Polish: "You are beautiful Natalia" translates to "Jesteś piękna Natalia." "You are beautiful Piotr" translates to "Jesteś piękny Piotr." piękn- is correctly genered.
  - rideontime 3y ago
    "gendered languages" are languages where every noun has a gender, not just people. Polish is one of them, so I'm not sure where the confusion lies.
    - madsbuch 3y ago
      There is no confusion. I am just challenging that machine translation is incapable of inferring genders. Danish is also a gendered language. The genders are difficult to learn because there rarely are any rules to the genders. Ie, you can not derive it from the word, but only from the context it is used in or idiomatically. This is an area neural networks perform well in. Sure, here are the translations of your sentences into Polish: "This is a beautiful book" translates to "To jest piękna książka." "This is a beautiful table" translates to "To jest piękny stół."
baz00 3y ago
Race to the bottom propelled by the current fad here we come. Duolingo has been completely fucking useless for me compared to spending a few hours in the country in question though. It's pretty much HOW DO I GO LEFT AT THE BAKERY level of teaching.
cyberninja15 3y ago
Duolingo was one of the first companies to partner with OpenAI on leveraging their language models. I think they were using GPT-3 before ChatGPT was even popularized.
gtmitchell 3y ago
This is sadly unsurprising. I have a foreign language degree and a bit over a decade ago, I spent some time trying to get a translation side-job off the ground. Even then it was clear that , except for a select few languages, it was a race to the bottom with machine translation software as the driving force. I gave up on that career idea quickly. Now I use ChatGPT and is does a great job. My experience with DuoLingo is it’s barely better than flash cards for language learning, and it’s no wonder they’re having a hard time making any money offering a product thats competition is cheaper and better.
demondemidi 3y ago
How does DuoLingo compare with Rosetta Stone? Is the latter better because it is expensive, or did Duolingo beat Rosetta by offering the same thing at a lower price? If Rosetta Stone is still better because it uses humans, I'd consider switching over, but it is like 3x the price of DL.
p0w3n3d 3y ago
I'm using Duolingo heavily and I've run already at least twice to a situation that: 1) my incorrect answer was accepted 2) incorrect English translation was provided by the app
- BarryMilo 3y ago
  When you think about it, this is why using AI-generated text is no better than using a dictionary. I want to learn from someone who actually thought about the text and whether it makes sense in context, not just whether it's free from errors. In order to translate like a human, AI needs to be AGI.
- forinti 3y ago
  I've seen some weird sentences in the French course. I have the impression they were written by a French speaker who needs to improve their English a bit.
redcobra762 3y ago
Eh, so many of these layoffs come disguised as one thing, but are really caused by another. How credible is the claim that AI is genuinely the cause?
pessimizer 3y ago
If anyone should be piling into AI, it should be Duolingo, or any kind of language teaching. Isn't translation what LLMs were for?
Zaskoda 3y ago
I see no problem, fundamentally, with leveraging the benefits of AI to generate content for whatever thing. I see the problem as those who contributed the content upon which the AI was trained not getting paid for the use of their content.
cassepipe 3y ago
I see a lot of complaining about Duolingo being worthless but I beg to differ. First I have not used the app but IIRC it uses a lot of "Choose the correct word among those four" but it's quite bad for reinforcement. It's much better to reinforce what you learned to have to type a sentence from scratch. I recommend using it on a computer. Also, I don't know if that exercise is still ther, but having to pronounce a sentence is also good. The problem was it was too easy to pass though. The other thing is that it does not replace learning the language, that is reading a grammar in order to know what are the general rules of the language. But it does replace conversation if you are not able to speak the language and provide a a good source of daily reinforcement, and vocabulary. It's an effective tool when used correctly in my opinion.
- impute 3y ago
  "I have not used the app"
  - oarsinsync 3y ago
    GP also notes: “I recommend using it on a computer.” App often refers to a mobile native app specifically, rather than the entirety of a product / service.
    - cassepipe 3y ago
      Exactly, thanks
- rymiel 3y ago
  They removed typing in answers for source language (i.e. English) translations. Was a feature, but now it's gone. You have to pick from the words they give you
  - lolinder 3y ago
    When it was a feature it was often frustratingly broken because their questions would have an ambiguity but they would only accept one possible answer as valid. So you would read the sentence, translate it, and then get told you were wrong because whoever wrote the question didn't recognize the ambiguity. Removing the feature altogether was probably cheaper than fixing all of their questions.
rafaelero 3y ago
That was predictable. The reaction of people here, saying that GPT4 output is of lower quality than of humans, is also a predictable cope.
nomilk 3y ago
Yesterday I was in the tech support discord for a large yc-backed company and after 25 minutes had plenty of replies but no useful, actionable info. Out of curiosity, I copy/pasted the question into ChatGPT. GPT's response was similar to the human's (~"look at the docs and do xyz") so I followed up with "did all those, now what?" and it immediately gave an accurate, actionable answer, and even mentioned an aspect I (and the company rep) never considered. Tl;dr AI gave the answer (plus bonus material) 2 orders of magnitude faster than an experienced human. It enabled me to go and try those things, reducing frustration caused by incomplete docs, product shortcomings, and slow (i.e. 'human') cycle times in replying. AI gets things wrong and hallucinates, but what it's replacing (humans) aren't exactly perfect either.
pipeline_peak 3y ago
How ironic, my motivation to learn a language left because of AI
- madsbuch 3y ago
  Interesting, why?
  - pipeline_peak 3y ago
    It’ll always be a net positive to learn a language. It just feels with the advancement of phones and AI redundant. Like yes your friends will be impressed and you can have real conversations with foreigners. But that time could’ve been spent idk changing your oil, baking a cake? I think this will make interpretation a far more demanding field. It’s only gonna require someone who deeply knows a language to verify the AI.
    - madsbuch 3y ago
      For me to have a foreign spouse requires that person to be able to sit around a dinner table in my home country and not force the entire tables to speak English. These technologies allow me to get started on languages so fast, that nationality becomes less of a hassle when dating bilingually. Again, I think one needs to have a dinner table with non-english speaker to really appreciate this :)
whycome 3y ago
I'm not into the game aspects of the app and it's really only been good for vocabulary for me. I've found reword on Android really good. Spaced repetition. And, in terms of AI, ChatGPT has been good because it lets you converse and respond with a real-sounding person. It's revolutionary.
Shorel 3y ago
More and more AI-powered language tools and applications are appearing. I have noticed this with Spanish: the translations from English are wonderful and skilful about 70% of the time, they could be improved about 25% of the time, and they are completely wrong and misleading the other 5%. This is a rough breakdown, sentence by sentence. The problem is that the 5% of incorrect sentences reduce the usefulness of the other 95%, so that the final translation is perceived as imprecise and lacking in coherence and tone.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  Can you give just a single example of these 5%?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Shorel 3y ago
    Of course. I may be paraphrasing a bit because I did not get the ad today. A recent app that has been spamming ads over my Instagram translates: I don't get it as: No lo obtengo When the correct translation in the context of the sentence is: No lo entiendo All the other sentences in the fragment are correct, from what I noticed at a glance.
matteoraso 3y ago
ChatGPT is so good at translation, it would be ridiculous for Duolingo to not leverage it. I've been using ChatGPT to learn Italian, and I've noticed while playing around with it that it can even perfectly translate endangered languages like Occitan, which is far too obscure for Duolingo. I wouldn't be surprised if Duolingo is leaning in on AI content because they see AI as a threat, not a tool, and they don't want customers to realize that they could do better with ChatGPT.
- elicksaur 3y ago
  > it can even perfectly translate endangered languages like Occitan I’m continually surprised by the ever increasing hype surrounding AI. How could this statement possibly be true? Does ChatGPT have any Occitan texts in its training corpus? Are you fluent in this language to be someone qualified to make such a determination? Every comment I’ve read from someone employed as a translator says it still doesn’t get the human nuances of languages. Yet, it perfectly knows this language? Wikipedia even says “Occitan does not have a single written standard form”[1]. If that context is true, how could any thing possibly translate it perfectly? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    > Every comment I’ve read from someone employed as a translator says it still doesn’t get the human nuances of languages. Yet, it perfectly knows this language? Wouldn't it be fun to make a bind test on these people? I would be surprised if they can statistically distinguish machine translations from human transactions.
    - elicksaur 3y ago
      Totally fair. I’d add it’s fair to also question how many people on the internet who claim to be employed translators are actually employed translators
  - crotchfire 3y ago
    > I’m continually surprised by the ever increasing hype surrounding AI. Try reading something other than HN. Seriously, the barftastic levels of AI-hype around here have passed the point of "okay this might perhaps be organic" for me.
G4BB3R 3y ago
Duolingo deleted the entire community-based Esperanto portuguese course. All the hard work, thrown away because it's not profitable enough.
nubinetwork 3y ago
I used Duolingo for ~650 days trying to learn Japanese (top 2% supposedly), but once you get that deep into the language, the robotic voices really start to get annoying. It skips over words, pronounces words wrong, and expects you to know new words before it even teaches them to you, and eventually I gave up. I might give the other language apps a try, but long story short, Duolingo doesn't need ai, they need a better speech engine.
wt__ 3y ago
Not used it for a year or two (got to a 365-day streak then decided to stop). What annoyed me most was they became one of "those" companies that goes to extreme lengths to make themselves impossible to contact (except for billing issues) - they closed all their forums, and you can endlessly search for a contact form, email address, phone number etc. and you'll find nothing.
DyslexicAtheist 3y ago
I have a subscription to both Duolingo and Memrise. Memrise I always struggled to get into even I initially felt it was useful. since their latest relase they've gone totally into the whole AI thing and the app is asking me to watch free youtube videos as part of the lesson that it selects for me. Totally useless. As for Duolingo it has invested too much in gamification / addiction. If you compete in tournaments you can spend around 1-3 hours every day "competing" yet your skills won't improve much. That means spending money to waste your time. In that case it's better to just stick with the regular lessons. Duolingo definitely suffers from "enshitification" and next year subscription I'll downgrade to free-tier because it's just stupid. IRL I signed up for 2 hour lessons twice a week. They are group activities that are not very intense but coupled with my homework bring me quicker to where I need to be. Plus they're a lot of fun, and I've made contacts IRL too. Language apps are just stupid.
fmajid 3y ago
Anecdotally, one of my parents' friends told me her daughter, a Frenchwoman living in Mexico and who works as a translator, has seen all her work vanish other than reviewing AI translations.
- dools 3y ago
  Doesn’t that just mean that more translation work can get done because all she has to do is review it instead of do it from scratch?
  - fmajid 3y ago
    More translation work for customers, perhaps, but reviewing is grinding work she has no interest in pursuing, and has the luxury of being in a position to do so.
ozten 3y ago
Duolingo is a case study in how too much gamification can create a toxic app. Recently, I happily paid $60 to use it, and after 7 days deleted and requested a refund.
heinrich5991 3y ago
https://archive.is/8Nq7u https://archive.is/8Nq7u
viburnum 3y ago
After getting fed up with Duolingo I came across “comprehensible input” videos on YouTube. It seems weird at first but it really does work.
j1elo 3y ago
How about other online learning sites like Babbel.com? Has anyone around used it and can comment on how good, effective, or otherwise it is? On thinking about learning a new European language, I had thought about using Duolingo for the first months to start getting some vocabulary, then jumping maybe onto Babbel for more serious study. But not sure if that works too well as far as online methods go.
andirk 3y ago
Duolingo should be seen as an "instead of scrolling Instagram", not instead of formal education. Change your browser's default language to your new language https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/languages https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/l... . Change your streaming services' default language. Watch your favorite shows in said language with subtitles! Greet your friends in your new language. You know you're doing it right when everyone around you knows you're learning that language. Chip away. When forced, even the old dog brain will learn new tricks.
nojvek 3y ago
2nd order realization is that the race to AGI is having computers do what humans do. Algorithms and compute is evolving at a much faster rate than humans. Our social fabric is still connected around capitalism. In US, Trump even reduced taxes, and pandemic + inflation jacked up living costs. So the current trend is that AI will cause a lot of people losing their livelihoods, and a few super crazy rich people. The first trillionares will be those who yield AI. The forces of Moloch dictate that AI will be a divider instead of a uniter.

245 points by leotravis10 3y ago

https://archive.ph/8Nq7u https://archive.ph/8Nq7u

The tweet that made the layoff news go viral: https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1744234385891594380 https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1744234385891594380

malfist 3y ago
Wow, so the layoff notice to contractors was "Thank you for working at Duolingo, here's an exit survey"? That's cold.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  "It looks like you missed you Duolingo lesson again, you know what happens now..."
- laweijfmvo 3y ago
  Probably the official notice came from their contracting agency.

viburnum 3y ago

I cancelled my subscription last year because the quality had gone down, and the UI changes kept getting worse.

skinkestek 3y ago
For everyone who wonder what the quality is like: it is impossible -even for native speakers - to pronounce certain words and in particular numbers I think in a way that makes duolingo accept them. This seems to be true for more than one language (think I have heard / read about it from both a Norwegian testing Norwegian and a Ukrainian testing Ukrainian language.
- ttmb 3y ago
  At the same time, it also seems to accept unintelligible grunting as a correct pronunciation for many questions, and not just German.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Duolingo is actually a great usecase for AI. It doesn't teach you a language in any meaningful sense, but is a fun side activity to practice. AI is great for apps like these.

z_open 3y ago

The machine generated content was already bad. I don't know if this AI transition will make it better or worse but I swear Duolingo was among the worst of apps I tried. People say it's ok to use supplementary when you have a 10 or 15 minute break but I think sentence mining or watching YouTube videos with subtitles is a better use of those minutes. I avoid telling giving this advice to people in real life because it seems dismissive of the time they are spending.

jjeaff 3y ago
I realize lots of people have learned languages by watching movies in the target language and reading subtitles in their native language, but I have found that to be highly difficult. I guess everyone is different, but given that the vast majority of people who read something while listening to something else will either comprehend something from one and nothing from the other, or worst case, get nothing from either, it seems likely that doing so to learn a language is not optimum. I could perhaps see this method as more effective in cases where the 2 languages are similar enough that there is some "lining up" between what you read and hear, but where the words are completely dissimilar and even sentence structure is completely different, I just don't see it as any better than a brute force method of learning.
- z_open 3y ago
  In my opinion, watching movies is ineffective until you can read the subtitles in the target language. This is at the B1/B2 level. Before that you're just focusing on the native language. Once you hit the B levels, things get easier. But it's uphill until then and tutors or courses are your best bet to get there.
  - Doxin 3y ago
    You've got it the wrong way around there. The spoken language should be the language you're trying to learn, the subtitles should be in your native language. Of course that'll not help you learn to read a foreign language.
- 3y ago

vouaobrasil 3y ago

Such a large part of making lifelong connections in this world are from hiring people who you need to make something work. I made some wonderful connections in my previous jobs that I never would have otherwise if they could do everything themselves with AI or if I could do everything myself without them. The fact is, automation can make life better but beyond a certain point, if hardly anyone needs anyone else, then all those wonderful connections of working together vanish. We can stil make those connections theoretically, but the lack of needing someone else removes the actuality and genuineness of the process. I wish that everyone who created AI and who welcomes it would think about this longer-time societal impact before becoming blinded with its immediate appeal. Sorry to say but I think making AI in general is one of the biggest mistakes we ever made.

madsbuch 3y ago
This is not really related to AI though? A company that was before 400 people, can now be 200 people. But people will rarely make meaningful bonds outside of those 5 people closest to them (Dunbar's number).
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  This is such an engineer's perspective. The point is, it is not just the number of connections, but the type of connection: diversity will be removed, since you only really need certain skillsets. The people with design skills and other types of skills will be removed. This numerical accounting perspective so widespread with engineers and computer scientists is the sort of reasoning that is bringing us to disaster.
- redcobra762 3y ago
  Dunbar’s Number is most commonly set at around 150, not 5.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    Dunbar is also talking about his layers of emotional closeness, where 5 is the innermost layer.

madsbuch 3y ago

I am learning Polish, and find that ChatGPT provides a much better tutor than any human. Ie. I would rather use ChatGPT than a human tutor, indifferent to the price. I am also developing my own app to learn languages, and I can get to Duolingo levels in roughly a weekend worth of side project. I project that a certain category of apps will die off really fast.

dralley 3y ago
How do you know for certain that you're not being taught by a confidently incorrect tutor?
- renewiltord 3y ago
  You never actually know that, and most people are. That's why there's so much "nous" use in French classes and so little "on" and so on. But the learn rate is so fast, that you get sufficient coverage to fix it up in actual conversation. My wife and I did a combo of another AI product (https://www.speak.com/ https://www.speak.com/) and ChatGPT to learn sufficient Spanish to get by in Chilean Patagonia and it did a pretty decent job (we just learned pronunciation through mimicry). We're not experts as a result, obviously, but it helped us get around and stuff which is fun. It was pretty much a crash course started as we were landing in Santiago (which is where we entered the country).
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    > But the learn rate is so fast, that you get sufficient coverage to fix it up in actual conversation. This should really be emphasised. Correctness might not be entirely on every time. But learning pace and engagement is so much higher, that it more than makes up for it. Especially engagement is a point where ChatGPT wins over all human teachers.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  I know that as well as with any human tutor. The main difference is that I am motivated to check the answer, eg. by asking the woman who is my main reason to learn Polish. Also, the value of a tutor that in and encouraging way corrects my verb conjugation of być (to be) for the 500th time has a lot more value than the risk of it being wrong on a corner case. A human tutor would semi-arrogantly have told be off and asked me to look at the dictionary (Yes, I have studied English, German, Spanish, and French in school, I have had more language teacher than anything else)

codetrotter 3y ago

If Duolingo wanted to invent a new word it is probable IMO that they would be able to introduce and popularize it, in spite of no one else having ever thought of that word. For example, if Duolingo wanted to invent “schmibbidibbi” as a word, they could give it a definition and start using it in their material. Pretty soon people would start using the word IRL. I wonder if there will ever be any words invented by AI that Duolingo accidentally teaches the world, which did initially not exist outside of the Duolingo app.

jkaptur 3y ago
What an amazing choice of new word - it's "Generation Alpha's first foray into internet culture" https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Skibidi_Toilet
- codetrotter 3y ago
  schmibbidibbi is clearly a distinct word, different from skibidi. But also near enough that conceivably an AI could invent the word schmibbidibbi if it knew skibidi. Depending on how it tokenizes words.
ikesau 3y ago
that's an interesting idea, but I dunno if "language learners" comprise a sufficiently influential cultural group to influence language in this way. If I learned a new word through duolingo, used it while speaking to native speakers of the language, and no one knew what it meant, I probably would be embarrassed and confused and not use the word again. But maybe it'll happen! And along that line, I wonder if advanced language models will be able to identify "missing words" that we're lacking to discuss concepts that we haven't yet conceptualized.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  The trick is to teach French learners that this word means something in French and at the same time to teach English learners that it means something in English. So you travel to France and practice your newly-learned French. You run across a French person who has been learning English. You use the word thinking that it’s French, and the person you speak to has already heard it as an English word and thinks that you don’t know the word in French but they know what you mean thinking it’s an English word.

helloericsf 3y ago

Which AI services does Duolingo use for the translations? It seems like they're satisfied with the outcome. Curious about the cost of the AI service as well.

data-ottawa 3y ago
OpenAI's GPT4 https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/ https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/
- thorum 3y ago
  My experience is that GPT-4 is quite good at most languages, including hard ones like Chinese - especially when paired with a “verification” step, where you copy something it wrote and start a new session and ask, “Is this sentence well-written <language>?” It has a surprisingly deep understanding of nuance and context. You can copy some Chinese text that Google Translate completely fails to translate, paste it into GPT-4 and ask “Please explain this text including any nuanced meaning that a foreigner would miss“ and get a detailed, coherent explanation.

dappermanneke 3y ago

it’s been going down in quality as an actual teaching aid for a while, beyond maybe sentence structure memorisation, so it’s sad to see this accelerate further

ttmb 3y ago

Wasn't one of their initial monetization ideas that crowdsourced translations - from amateurs, not even paid contractors - would outperform AI translation? The translation thing never came close to panning out, from what I can tell. Back in the day you used to be able to see a mini discussion thread about any exercise. The comments in these threads - from unpaid users - were frequently much more helpful than the official teaching notes. But they got rid of those a while back, too. At the time people suggested it was because they wanted to push people into some sort of paid tutoring offering that they'd announced. But I don't see any hint of that around. Now I'd guess it's because the questions are no longer hand crafted by people, and are now autogenerated by AI, leading to an inability to have discussions about specific questions.

Nadya 3y ago
This seems to be a scaling issue for all of these online language/SRS learning systems. Every single one of them scales and then starts dialing back/deleting/hiding all of the user-generated content that helped the platform get to where it is today. Almost a decade ago "smart.fm" was a thing and the best thing about it was all of the user-generated content (blogs) offering discussions and explanations for so many various languages. From grammatical concepts being explained to people asking questions and having users provide answers in public Q&A style format. Then smart.fm got rid of all of that and became "iknow.jp" and deleted everyone's blogs and hard work built to create the smart.fm community (many of whom then moved to Memrise). Memrise was originally about using user-submitted mnemonics and it had a vast library of them being created. Nowadays, as far as I can tell, none of the mnemonics are around anymore and they're no longer the focus. The focus is on monetization and gamification of their Pro user stats (of which I have lifetime membership until the year 9999 due to my help/work during their Beta testing years). Because mnemonics were the focus - words across all of their courses had to be combined so that the mnemonics between courses would carry over. Myself and a number of (unpaid) volunteers spent months combining all of the words for every popularly used language (I helped with the Japanese dictionary) across all existing courses at that time. Hosting (and moderating) user-generated content is an issue at scale. At the start when you have mostly good faith actors and few trolls it works quite well. But after a certain scale moderation becomes a massive issue. At least I got a cool staff-only T-shirts out of it. Ben is an awesome dude and when I donated to the Memrise bus tour godfundme I asked if I could have one of their staff shirts that I knew they had - and they actually sent me one instead of one of the bus tour shirts! The better funded of these sites seem to last a bit longer/scale a bit larger but it seems the death of user-generated content is inevitable after a certain point.

charcircuit 3y ago

There isn't really a need for human translators in language learning. Machine translation is good enough at translating into one's one native language and the translation quality doesn't really matter as you already know your native language.

vintermann 3y ago
I don't want it to translate to my native language. We happened to have a teacher who was an old Esperantist with some quirky ideas, so I learned English with the so-called direct method. That means that after the first class, the teacher and everyone spoke only English in class. The textbook relied heavily on pictures. Lots of people don't like the direct method, and I can understand why it's unpleasant, but it worked really well for me. I had German lessons in school for a long time, but never gained anything like the fluency I got in English - the German teachers varied from some very archaic grammar-translation stuff ("durchfürgegenohneum", "ausbeimitnachseitvonzu" etc.) to the ones who seemed to have no plan at all. LLMs should be able to teach me with the direct method, though fine-tuning would help.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > the German teachers varied from some very archaic grammar-translation stuff ("durchfürgegenohneum", "ausbeimitnachseitvonzu" etc.) to the ones who seemed to have no plan at all. Native German speaker here: such grammatical structures are really how I think about my mother tongue, thus I do believe these are good exercises: always have the grammar tree in the back of your mind when you speak German "and then speak this grammar tree". :-) In opposite to English, in German grammar is quite important.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    Maybe it's how you think about it today, but it's not how you learned it, and it wasn't a way I succeeded at ever becoming fluent in it. Grammar is just as important in English, it just hides its complexity elsewhere.

vr46 3y ago

Duolingo should be on borrowed time, as a method to learn a language it’s inefficient to the point of being ineffective - it seems to serve as an acceptable reason for fiddling with one’s phone, like a Guilt-Eze pill. I spent 18 months on it and the learning was soundly thrashed by three weeks in a classroom, and for all the pupils, not just me, primed for success by 18 months with Duolingo. Unless anyone has had a different experience, Duolingo is an exercise in self-deception. No doubt there will be people in difficult situations that have managed just fine with Duolingo, or in spite of it, but it doesn’t feel like a growing market.

jncfhnb 3y ago
I feel like you’re saying “primed for success” ironically but I’m not seeing the irony.
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  If they were actually primed for success then 18 months of Duolingo should've given them a significant head start on the other students. Judging by the tone, I'm assuming that didn't actually occur.
- eterm 3y ago
  It took me a few times to understand their sentence correctly. What I think OP meant to say: All pupils found success. My success could be explained by being primed for success with 18 months of duolingo, but all pupils had similar success. As written, it reads like "all pupils [...] primed for success by duolingo" which is perhaps why you tried to look for irony to match it with their conclusion.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Hah ok. I’m amused.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Studying Duolingo for 18 months should have primed them for success, but after just three weeks of an in-person class, it was evident that it had not. It's implied (or assumed) that the class was for 2nd year students or less, so Duolingo must be less effective than traditional instruction.

partiallypro 3y ago

I coincidentally saw a video recently about how Duolingo's AI model was getting some French things wrong. I use Duolingo, but it's a vocab tool more than anything.

unyttigfjelltol 3y ago

LLMs are the masters of bilingual bullshit, so really Duolingo has no choice but embrace them. The LLM stuff embedded in their existing product is challenging in a different and better way.

graypegg 3y ago

Why would I use duolingo if it has about the same product as opening google translate, moving the target language side off the screen, typing in some inane sentence, guessing what it says, and revealing. You take a product that had the USP of “quality” and decided you’d rather play in the “AI sludge content” thunderdome where anyone with a vague understanding of web development and openAI api access can compete with you for functionally the same product.

vintermann 3y ago
Well, these days, Google Translate is pretty bad as machine translation services go... it's much better to ask an instruction tuned multilingual LLM to translate for you.
ChadNauseam 3y ago
> Why would I use duolingo if it has about the same product as opening google translate, moving the target language side off the screen, typing in some inane sentence, guessing what it says, and revealing. That seems like a way worse UX to me than what duolingo offers
- graypegg 3y ago
  I wouldn’t say it’s exceptionally worse considering it’s free vs begging you for microtransactions. Gamification is easy enough on your own, get some ice cream! If you need accountability, ask a friend. You could alternatively fill up millions of flash cards in Anki with random phrases out of chatGPT and really hone in on the Duolingo simplicity. Silly examples, but I just feel like “AI phrases with TTS audio displayed along side 1 of 20 PNGs of a cartoon character” isn’t really a defendable product in a market that churns out multiple copies of that idea a month. They used to be a course that was designed by employees/volunteers interested in language (in theory), now it’s a randomized. Eh.
attentive 3y ago
Structure and progress.

pjmlp 3y ago

It is coming to all, including programming, just remember that.

BizarreByte 3y ago
Indeed. Cheer on the tech if you like, but don't be surprised when you're out of work for the foreseeable future next.
- ben_w 3y ago
  "Ask not for whom the Paperclip Optimiser tolls, it tolls for thee."

surfingdino 3y ago

AI translation falls flat on its face with gendered languages, when it is given text in English and has to translate it into French, German, or Polish. How is that even a consideration for a service that's supposed to be teaching people languages?

frabcus 3y ago
Google Translate and DeepL are pretty bad at this, that's true. As far as I can tell they translate a sentence at a time. Using an LLM and giving more context, it can infer gender from signals earlier in the text. This based on testing we did at the last place I worked. What kind of cases do you have gender failing, with which tools?
- madsbuch 3y ago
  > ... it can infer gender from signals earlier in the text Or even later in the text. Which is one of the great thing about transformers.
madsbuch 3y ago
Can you give an example of this? In my experience (learning Polish) ChatGPT can usually derive the gender when the subject is a common name: Sure, here are the translations of your sentences into Polish: "You are beautiful Natalia" translates to "Jesteś piękna Natalia." "You are beautiful Piotr" translates to "Jesteś piękny Piotr." piękn- is correctly genered.
- rideontime 3y ago
  "gendered languages" are languages where every noun has a gender, not just people. Polish is one of them, so I'm not sure where the confusion lies.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    There is no confusion. I am just challenging that machine translation is incapable of inferring genders. Danish is also a gendered language. The genders are difficult to learn because there rarely are any rules to the genders. Ie, you can not derive it from the word, but only from the context it is used in or idiomatically. This is an area neural networks perform well in. Sure, here are the translations of your sentences into Polish: "This is a beautiful book" translates to "To jest piękna książka." "This is a beautiful table" translates to "To jest piękny stół."

baz00 3y ago

Race to the bottom propelled by the current fad here we come. Duolingo has been completely fucking useless for me compared to spending a few hours in the country in question though. It's pretty much HOW DO I GO LEFT AT THE BAKERY level of teaching.

cyberninja15 3y ago

Duolingo was one of the first companies to partner with OpenAI on leveraging their language models. I think they were using GPT-3 before ChatGPT was even popularized.

gtmitchell 3y ago

This is sadly unsurprising. I have a foreign language degree and a bit over a decade ago, I spent some time trying to get a translation side-job off the ground. Even then it was clear that , except for a select few languages, it was a race to the bottom with machine translation software as the driving force. I gave up on that career idea quickly. Now I use ChatGPT and is does a great job. My experience with DuoLingo is it’s barely better than flash cards for language learning, and it’s no wonder they’re having a hard time making any money offering a product thats competition is cheaper and better.

demondemidi 3y ago

How does DuoLingo compare with Rosetta Stone? Is the latter better because it is expensive, or did Duolingo beat Rosetta by offering the same thing at a lower price? If Rosetta Stone is still better because it uses humans, I'd consider switching over, but it is like 3x the price of DL.

p0w3n3d 3y ago

I'm using Duolingo heavily and I've run already at least twice to a situation that: 1) my incorrect answer was accepted 2) incorrect English translation was provided by the app

BarryMilo 3y ago
When you think about it, this is why using AI-generated text is no better than using a dictionary. I want to learn from someone who actually thought about the text and whether it makes sense in context, not just whether it's free from errors. In order to translate like a human, AI needs to be AGI.
forinti 3y ago
I've seen some weird sentences in the French course. I have the impression they were written by a French speaker who needs to improve their English a bit.

redcobra762 3y ago

Eh, so many of these layoffs come disguised as one thing, but are really caused by another. How credible is the claim that AI is genuinely the cause?

pessimizer 3y ago

If anyone should be piling into AI, it should be Duolingo, or any kind of language teaching. Isn't translation what LLMs were for?

Zaskoda 3y ago

I see no problem, fundamentally, with leveraging the benefits of AI to generate content for whatever thing. I see the problem as those who contributed the content upon which the AI was trained not getting paid for the use of their content.

cassepipe 3y ago

I see a lot of complaining about Duolingo being worthless but I beg to differ. First I have not used the app but IIRC it uses a lot of "Choose the correct word among those four" but it's quite bad for reinforcement. It's much better to reinforce what you learned to have to type a sentence from scratch. I recommend using it on a computer. Also, I don't know if that exercise is still ther, but having to pronounce a sentence is also good. The problem was it was too easy to pass though. The other thing is that it does not replace learning the language, that is reading a grammar in order to know what are the general rules of the language. But it does replace conversation if you are not able to speak the language and provide a a good source of daily reinforcement, and vocabulary. It's an effective tool when used correctly in my opinion.

impute 3y ago
"I have not used the app"
- oarsinsync 3y ago
  GP also notes: “I recommend using it on a computer.” App often refers to a mobile native app specifically, rather than the entirety of a product / service.
  - cassepipe 3y ago
    Exactly, thanks
rymiel 3y ago
They removed typing in answers for source language (i.e. English) translations. Was a feature, but now it's gone. You have to pick from the words they give you
- lolinder 3y ago
  When it was a feature it was often frustratingly broken because their questions would have an ambiguity but they would only accept one possible answer as valid. So you would read the sentence, translate it, and then get told you were wrong because whoever wrote the question didn't recognize the ambiguity. Removing the feature altogether was probably cheaper than fixing all of their questions.

rafaelero 3y ago

That was predictable. The reaction of people here, saying that GPT4 output is of lower quality than of humans, is also a predictable cope.

nomilk 3y ago

Yesterday I was in the tech support discord for a large yc-backed company and after 25 minutes had plenty of replies but no useful, actionable info. Out of curiosity, I copy/pasted the question into ChatGPT. GPT's response was similar to the human's (~"look at the docs and do xyz") so I followed up with "did all those, now what?" and it immediately gave an accurate, actionable answer, and even mentioned an aspect I (and the company rep) never considered. Tl;dr AI gave the answer (plus bonus material) 2 orders of magnitude faster than an experienced human. It enabled me to go and try those things, reducing frustration caused by incomplete docs, product shortcomings, and slow (i.e. 'human') cycle times in replying. AI gets things wrong and hallucinates, but what it's replacing (humans) aren't exactly perfect either.

pipeline_peak 3y ago

How ironic, my motivation to learn a language left because of AI

madsbuch 3y ago
Interesting, why?
- pipeline_peak 3y ago
  It’ll always be a net positive to learn a language. It just feels with the advancement of phones and AI redundant. Like yes your friends will be impressed and you can have real conversations with foreigners. But that time could’ve been spent idk changing your oil, baking a cake? I think this will make interpretation a far more demanding field. It’s only gonna require someone who deeply knows a language to verify the AI.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    For me to have a foreign spouse requires that person to be able to sit around a dinner table in my home country and not force the entire tables to speak English. These technologies allow me to get started on languages so fast, that nationality becomes less of a hassle when dating bilingually. Again, I think one needs to have a dinner table with non-english speaker to really appreciate this :)

whycome 3y ago

I'm not into the game aspects of the app and it's really only been good for vocabulary for me. I've found reword on Android really good. Spaced repetition. And, in terms of AI, ChatGPT has been good because it lets you converse and respond with a real-sounding person. It's revolutionary.

Shorel 3y ago

More and more AI-powered language tools and applications are appearing. I have noticed this with Spanish: the translations from English are wonderful and skilful about 70% of the time, they could be improved about 25% of the time, and they are completely wrong and misleading the other 5%. This is a rough breakdown, sentence by sentence. The problem is that the 5% of incorrect sentences reduce the usefulness of the other 95%, so that the final translation is perceived as imprecise and lacking in coherence and tone.

madsbuch 3y ago
Can you give just a single example of these 5%?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Shorel 3y ago
  Of course. I may be paraphrasing a bit because I did not get the ad today. A recent app that has been spamming ads over my Instagram translates: I don't get it as: No lo obtengo When the correct translation in the context of the sentence is: No lo entiendo All the other sentences in the fragment are correct, from what I noticed at a glance.

matteoraso 3y ago

ChatGPT is so good at translation, it would be ridiculous for Duolingo to not leverage it. I've been using ChatGPT to learn Italian, and I've noticed while playing around with it that it can even perfectly translate endangered languages like Occitan, which is far too obscure for Duolingo. I wouldn't be surprised if Duolingo is leaning in on AI content because they see AI as a threat, not a tool, and they don't want customers to realize that they could do better with ChatGPT.

elicksaur 3y ago
> it can even perfectly translate endangered languages like Occitan I’m continually surprised by the ever increasing hype surrounding AI. How could this statement possibly be true? Does ChatGPT have any Occitan texts in its training corpus? Are you fluent in this language to be someone qualified to make such a determination? Every comment I’ve read from someone employed as a translator says it still doesn’t get the human nuances of languages. Yet, it perfectly knows this language? Wikipedia even says “Occitan does not have a single written standard form”[1]. If that context is true, how could any thing possibly translate it perfectly? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language
- madsbuch 3y ago
  > Every comment I’ve read from someone employed as a translator says it still doesn’t get the human nuances of languages. Yet, it perfectly knows this language? Wouldn't it be fun to make a bind test on these people? I would be surprised if they can statistically distinguish machine translations from human transactions.
  - elicksaur 3y ago
    Totally fair. I’d add it’s fair to also question how many people on the internet who claim to be employed translators are actually employed translators
- crotchfire 3y ago
  > I’m continually surprised by the ever increasing hype surrounding AI. Try reading something other than HN. Seriously, the barftastic levels of AI-hype around here have passed the point of "okay this might perhaps be organic" for me.

G4BB3R 3y ago

Duolingo deleted the entire community-based Esperanto portuguese course. All the hard work, thrown away because it's not profitable enough.

nubinetwork 3y ago

I used Duolingo for ~650 days trying to learn Japanese (top 2% supposedly), but once you get that deep into the language, the robotic voices really start to get annoying. It skips over words, pronounces words wrong, and expects you to know new words before it even teaches them to you, and eventually I gave up. I might give the other language apps a try, but long story short, Duolingo doesn't need ai, they need a better speech engine.

wt__ 3y ago

Not used it for a year or two (got to a 365-day streak then decided to stop). What annoyed me most was they became one of "those" companies that goes to extreme lengths to make themselves impossible to contact (except for billing issues) - they closed all their forums, and you can endlessly search for a contact form, email address, phone number etc. and you'll find nothing.

DyslexicAtheist 3y ago

I have a subscription to both Duolingo and Memrise. Memrise I always struggled to get into even I initially felt it was useful. since their latest relase they've gone totally into the whole AI thing and the app is asking me to watch free youtube videos as part of the lesson that it selects for me. Totally useless. As for Duolingo it has invested too much in gamification / addiction. If you compete in tournaments you can spend around 1-3 hours every day "competing" yet your skills won't improve much. That means spending money to waste your time. In that case it's better to just stick with the regular lessons. Duolingo definitely suffers from "enshitification" and next year subscription I'll downgrade to free-tier because it's just stupid. IRL I signed up for 2 hour lessons twice a week. They are group activities that are not very intense but coupled with my homework bring me quicker to where I need to be. Plus they're a lot of fun, and I've made contacts IRL too. Language apps are just stupid.

fmajid 3y ago

Anecdotally, one of my parents' friends told me her daughter, a Frenchwoman living in Mexico and who works as a translator, has seen all her work vanish other than reviewing AI translations.

dools 3y ago
Doesn’t that just mean that more translation work can get done because all she has to do is review it instead of do it from scratch?
- fmajid 3y ago
  More translation work for customers, perhaps, but reviewing is grinding work she has no interest in pursuing, and has the luxury of being in a position to do so.

ozten 3y ago

Duolingo is a case study in how too much gamification can create a toxic app. Recently, I happily paid $60 to use it, and after 7 days deleted and requested a refund.

heinrich5991 3y ago

https://archive.is/8Nq7u https://archive.is/8Nq7u

viburnum 3y ago

After getting fed up with Duolingo I came across “comprehensible input” videos on YouTube. It seems weird at first but it really does work.

j1elo 3y ago

How about other online learning sites like Babbel.com? Has anyone around used it and can comment on how good, effective, or otherwise it is? On thinking about learning a new European language, I had thought about using Duolingo for the first months to start getting some vocabulary, then jumping maybe onto Babbel for more serious study. But not sure if that works too well as far as online methods go.

andirk 3y ago

Duolingo should be seen as an "instead of scrolling Instagram", not instead of formal education. Change your browser's default language to your new language https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/languages https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/l... . Change your streaming services' default language. Watch your favorite shows in said language with subtitles! Greet your friends in your new language. You know you're doing it right when everyone around you knows you're learning that language. Chip away. When forced, even the old dog brain will learn new tricks.

nojvek 3y ago

2nd order realization is that the race to AGI is having computers do what humans do. Algorithms and compute is evolving at a much faster rate than humans. Our social fabric is still connected around capitalism. In US, Trump even reduced taxes, and pandemic + inflation jacked up living costs. So the current trend is that AI will cause a lot of people losing their livelihoods, and a few super crazy rich people. The first trillionares will be those who yield AI. The forces of Moloch dictate that AI will be a divider instead of a uniter.