A place to post ridiculous posts from linkedIn.com
(Full transparency.. a mod for this sub happens to work there.. but that doesn't influence his moderation or laughter at a lot of posts.)
Ever since their content is being created or at least sub crrated by AI the quality has gone down noticeable, ive seen so many incorrect sentences which is shit when trying to learn a language. And if i, as a beginner learner can figure out wrong sentences what the actual fuck is ai doing?
This email makes no sense.
Let me paraphrase them:
We bet on mobile and won big. AI is great. AI tutors are a thing.
Therefore we'll get AI to understand our codebase and get it to fo stuff people did before
This isn't "betting on" AI. This is outsourcing to AI.
You can be an AI company (theoretically) - have people make AI models that are then deployed. Note the lack of recursively, made-by-AI-for-AI products and services.
Tbh, Duolingo was always a gimmick. It doesn't teach you a language. It teaches you small snippets of 5-10 words each with little to no grammar. It's repetitive and boring. It was that way before the lives they said they'd never add.
They lost me as a user when they rolled out lives.
Now, I hope they lose someone else.
Duolingo has potential. But learning a language always required a large time investmant, and it always will.
I assume its lessons will only get worse than they already are.
AI could make Duolingo better because it doesn't teach a language in its current state. It could explain to the user why their answer is wrong and offer exercises. But instead of doing that, they simply replace employees to save money? What a garbage company. It's a shame their app is so popular. It gives people nothing but a false sense of learning.
It could explain to the user why their answer is wrong
FWIW that feature has existed in the premium version for about a year or so
I abandoned Duolingo 6 months ago. If that's true, they failed to advertise that to me. In any case, with modern llms you don't need Duolingo for that. You can ask them. You can copy-paste any article on a subject that interests you, and ask an llm to simplify it to your A1-A2 level. You can ask it to generate exercises, to explain things. Flashcards? Please, Anki is free.
When I got rid of Duo, it had removed the crowd sourced explanations and only had the super-premium support in select countries, so even if I wanted to subscribe to it, as a non-American, I couldn't.
Mind you, I didn't want the AI-based version because yeah. I could use Anki + ChatGPT for free.
Neat. Here's how you can delete your account: https://www.duolingo.com/help/delete-my-account-and-data
Perfect. Thank you.
Yay thanks
Just in time for spring cleaning. Thanks.
Can I delete my account if I never made an account in the first pace?
Duolingo has been using AI for a bit at least for their content, and it sucks
I was gonna say language learning is actually one of the few AI might be useful for, but they're not talking about making their users learn with a little AI translator having a random conversation with them; they're replacing their workforce with AI.
Fuck. I was considering using Duo once I finish school to give myself some more options to flee the US as we dive deeper into nazism. Any good alternatives?
The problem with current AI text generation is that it can be wrong, which is bad if you are trusting it with giving correct information to learn
Deepl, even though its made for translating, it is often wrong
Language Transfer, lingodeer
As someone learning Japanese
There's no fucking way AI would be able to assist in learning a second language
I know I'm going to sound like a stock Marxist from the 1930s, but: AI is a means of production and therefore should be collectivized.
Any good alternatives?
Join a class. These apps are a waste of time.
Anki is great for flashcards with lots of community generated decks for free download:
i mean the way humans are made to learn languages is just simple immersion, consume media in the target language and your brain will figure it out.
the one thing to keep in mind is that you don't want subtitles, because then you won't actually be paying attention to the target language. If you can stomach it then children's media is great because it's specifically made to be simple and teach children the language.
I’m wondering which of these 2 options is true for the chief techbro who came up with this:
They believe in infinite growth. They think LLMs are going to get reliable fast. LLMs have probably played a direct role in convincing them of that
Yep they're paying lip service to the employees but this message is 100% to potential investors looking to bet on the AI wave.
Them: this is not about replacing employees with AI
they then proceed to explain how they will give new work to AI first instead of hiring people
Thankfully this shit service has never seen a cent from me (and I know 2 languages), and I'll definitely keep it this way...
It was a good app ten years ago when you could use it as much as you wanted for a few short ads. Now its an ad-ridden mtxfest.
that's the really depressing part, they took something that could have kind of revolutionized the world (imagine everyone having easy access to learning the major languages), and just snapped its neck like a defenseless kitten
I hate Duolingo and this LinkedIn Lunacy just strenghtens my (somewhat unpopular) view.
For the first time ever, teaching as well as the best human tutors is within our reach.
No it fucking isn't. The video calls are awful and don't do anything to help you learn why what you said is wrong. Lilly just acts confused and ignores what you said. And in their normal explanations it just assumes why you didn't know something, gives an answer for what it guessed, and doesn't do anything else. The old explanations were much better than the new garbage they offer.
That's pretty on point for the kind of stereotypical girl lily is supposed to be.
Thanks for the heads up. Deleted my account and unistalled their app.
Can't be good for the quality. I already get a lot of errors in my native language: the correct translation to my native language is not accepted and the "correct translation according to Duolingo" is grammatically wrong. So I keep getting errors for not using wrong grammar in my own mother language. This is going to keep getting so much worse and I have to wonder, if I'm even learning the correct grammar in the foreign language.
yeah, it's pretty common for AI answers to feel very accurate and useful on topics the user doesn't know much about, but highly error-prone and unreliable on topics the user is an expert in. ... ... ...
Sure it's wrong about my area of expertise, but I'm sure it's right about everyone else's!
Humans-last
Honestly I was thinking of removing duo before this. It's just glorified flash cards making you memorize words associations instead of getting into how thimgs work. I still haven't gotten the rules of how verb conjugation works in Italian. Just gonna read the books I got.
I was using Khan Academy when they went to AI. Suddenly my answers were being marked as incorrect, even though they matched the "correct" answer presented. Or they were marked incorrect becuase I used pi, when it said I could answer in terms of pi.
I'm expecting the same to happen here.
the last sentence is crazy foreshadowing
I haven't used the app for a while, but I still have it installed. The delete account button doesn't work, and neither does the feedback button. Cool.
Glad I finished my first Dutch unit just to get the basics and am deleting the app today. It feels like a real condemnation of the state of modern AI that I don't trust a large language model with languages.
Ive been going physical first. i dont pay for any subscriptions anymore, and my Jellyfin collection I'd going great. fuck subscriptions, fuck ai, fuck algorithms feeding you shit. just live man. go outside, catch a butterfly. be free while u still can.
I would rather talk with read dude to learn English than AI
I'm working on Spanish now with it and I have to admit it's significantly improved from the last time I used it a few years back. Fewer nonsense sentences to translate like "My bear loves your house", which was frustrating and felt so useless. There's way more listening and speaking modules, they are generally decent at speech to text, and the language pronunciation sounds more realistic with multiple very different voices.
However, I never know why I got a question wrong, and can't do anything to rectify that other than report that the AI made a mistake, which helps with their model training, but does absolutely squat for my learning. Even the more gamified exercises are just fancy tests, where you are expected to 'learn' by getting things wrong, seeing the correct answer and regurgitating it. The community forums and explanations are gone, and each module has maybe one or two example sentences that typically don't even cover the full range of content in the module.
My husband and I have a family plan, and he is a much more dedicated user than me, but I would never pay for duolingo on my own.
I left after seeing a lot of useful community suggestions completely ignored for a long time. A few months later they finally closed the community making clear they won't hear anyone. I won't bother trying to get anything from them.
Just calling it out: The nonsense/goofy sentences were used because it was found by studies to be more effective for learning/recall.
That wasn't a flaw, just a poorly/not at all broadcasted feature.
I have found that Language Transfer is a far superior way to learn languages (including Spanish), and it's free (although I make a monthly donation)!
It is available as YouTube videos, SoundCloud MP3s, or on a very simple but effective app.
Yai so on top of being an expert in telling all the animal names in a foreign language but not one consecutive sentence - what will come next ? More sample sentences like „the mouse eats the elephant“? (No joke had that one)
I came across "The bear is wearing its dresses"
Good luck with that, I'll watch the outcome with great interest.