The Decline of Duolingo Should Be a Warning of the Failings of AI

Last month, CNBC reported that Duolingo, the language-learning app, saw its stock crater 25%. This slump in their profits came after the company implemented new artificial intelligence tools and described themsleves as “AI-first” earlier this year. This shift led to the company laying off many employees who did the actual translations. Users revolted, especially those who pay to use the platform, and their concerns were proven right. Consumers began noting how the AI-first Duolingo offered incorrect translations. The lessons became increasingly repetitive. Certain sections were locked off to those not paying to learn. Clearly, enough users decided to delete the app rather than stick around to watch the ensh*ttification first-hand, and it made an impact where it hurts.

The company’s CEO, Luis Von Ahn, said that he ‘did not expect the amount of blowback’ to Duolingo’s AI embrace, but that they would still move forward with this plan. ‘There are experiments that put monetization and user growth at odds, and part of my job has been, always, arbitrating between these two,’ he told CNBC. One wonders if he’s truly aware of how he’s fallen into the trap of every tech company that tries to pretend the invasion of AI is inevitable.

Duolingo started life in 2009 when Von Ahn, then a computing professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wanted to make an education-based project following his creation of reCAPTCHA. By 2012, it had launched as an app with a hefty amount of venture capitalist funding (and investment from Ashton Kutcher), and it didn’t take long for its userbase to build.

The hook of Duolingo over other language-learning platforms was its bite-sized exercises that you could do at any time and for any length. It was also gamified, blending competition and education. Users were encouraged to compete in leagues against random users also trying to pick up a few words of German or Japanese. If you maintained your daily streak, you were rewarded. While Duolingo was often mocked for some of its more questionable translations — ‘The bride is a woman and the groom is a hedgehog’ — users enjoyed the easy going offerings that were more casual than a classroom and accessible for total newbies.

Some users found Duolingo helpful, but the data backing up some of the company’s more outlandish claims suggested serious issues behind their learning model. According to Duolingo’s own 2021 study, five sections of the app are roughly equivalent to five semesters of university instruction. A 2022 study published in Foreign Language Annals did find that it could be an effective tool for adults, but even Duolingo’s own research found that English learners didn’t do great with grammar, and listening exercises continues to be a big hurdle with the app. Those issues have been seemingly exacerbated by AI creating huge swaths of the content. That switch to AI-first practices came with a statement from the company telling employees to ‘take occasional small hits on quality’ rather than ‘move slowly and miss the moment.’ Faster and cheaper matters more than accurate.

Many of Duolingo’s sticker elements felt far less excusable once AI got involved. That gamified model of encouraging engagement became far more annoying. It didn’t help that the company, like every other corporate giant, fashioned itself into a self-aware wannabe millennial online presence that never took anything seriously and pretended to be a real person. The Duolingo mascot, a green owl named Duo, was moulded into an irony-poisoned chaos demon who aggressively reminded users to log in and keep up their streaks. This year, the company jokingly killed off Duo but told users that they could resurrect him if they obtained 50 billion in-app experiences. There’s nothing like emotional blackmail to keep your profits up.

In a market that demands constant economic growth, Duolingo did what every other once-hot business did, even as its loyal users revolted: it made its platform actively worse. The exhausting and futile fight for perpetual profit, for ever-growing customer bases and opportunities for growth beyond reason, requires an active contempt for your consumers. It expects you to willingly swallow whatever slop is flung your way because they believe you’ll stick around no matter what. You put in all those months of lessons and that damn owl has berated you into maintaining an impressive streak, and you wouldn’t want to lose it, would you? You wouldn’t want to fall down the leadership board or make the site sad. Duo’s watching you.

Cory Doctorow’s theory of ensh*ttification posits that businesses deliberately degrade their offerings to maximise short-term profits for shareholders, even if it means the long-term decline of their brand. Take Facebook, for example, which evolved from a simple website to keep up with your friends to an algorithmically-driven nightmare of falsehoods, ads, and outright lies in their business practices that have made the site irrevocably toxic and straight-up unusable.

This is the status quo for late-stage capitalism. These companies offer something people want, then they consolidate the market and realise it still won’t make them as rich as they want to be. So, they overload the thing with ads, mess up user experience, jack up the prices and make you pay more for less. The goal is to make you so dependent on these platforms, in large part because they’ve wholly devoured their competition, then make pay through the nose for slop. Duolingo knows what it’s doing, but they truly didn’t expect their users to say ‘no’ and delete the app. Enough of them decided they didn’t want to be bothered by that owl anymore.

I’ve been learning how to speak Chinese. For no reason beyond a desire to try something new and enriching, I decided to sign up for classes in something totally new and unfamiliar. Every week, I go into a real classroom with my teacher and fellow students, and we collaborate on this fascinating new experience. It’s been tough - learning Mandarin is utterly unlike anything else I’ve done - but rewarding beyond measure. I’m an apple-polishing nerd at heart and I like having homework to do, assignments to work on, and the communal experience of an in-person class. I understand this isn’t an option open to everyone but I heartily recommend it to those who want to give it a go. At the very least, it’s proven to be far more effective for me than anything Duolingo’s ever done.

I wrote last week about how AI was ruining all of our hobbies, and Duolingo is yet another reminder of that, but it’s also about how corporate rule turns everything into #content and makes it worse. Only tech bros could take the magic of communication across language barriers and turn it into a glitchy addiction-driven slog that requires endless grinding for barely workable results. Surely, the last thing we need are more ways to misunderstand one another.