To preface this post, no, the Lang Lab team is NOT urging you to delete the beloved owl app!
It’s not a surprise that many of us have been hooked on Duolingo: it’s simple yet entertaining interface along with straightforward tasks paired with audio and visual tools have aided many on their language learning journeys. Love it or hate it, as of 2024 Duolingo has reached 116.7 million active users and that number could even be 500 million if one takes into account not-so-frequent users.
As good as it is, Duolingo has been hit with AI accusations — experts claim the app has been firing workers preferring the low-cost AI algorithms. The topic of AI use in the contemporary tech industry has never been as controversial as it is right now — AI has been blamed for massive layoffs and “soulless” algorithms that deprive many apps and websites of human creativity and fact-checking. Duolingo isn’t an exception to this wave of artificially generated codes.
What should we do? Duolingo already holds a sizable monopoly in the online world of language resources and many have credited the app with its substantial help throughout their language acquisition paths.
It’s not a secret that AI generated content is (mostly) easy to spot — many of us have stumbled upon weird sentences such as “I like pink avocados” when doing our daily Duolingo tasks and that left us wondering as if that was ever human-checked. What’s really important in this scenario is to be in open communication with those who make decision in regards to Duolingo’s algorithms: leave feedback, comments, perhaps even write an email. Even a partial boycott could prompt the company to put its workers over AI bots but that’s a personal decision of every individual. What’s evident as of right now is that we should exercise awareness and AI consciousness to ensure that human intelligence and creativity remains in the core of every tech product