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The growing use of generative AI is coming at the expense of human workers at Duolingo, a popular language learning app.
Duolingo tells Bloomberg that it's cutting 10% of its contractors, months after its CEO said Duolingo is relying more on generative AI to develop its content.
“We just no longer need as many people to do the type of work some of these contractors were doing. Part of that could be attributed to AI,” a Duolingo spokesperson tells Bloomberg.
This comes after an unnamed Duolingo contractor claimed on Reddit that Duolingo had axed a large number of jobs. “In December 2023, Duolingo ‘off boarded’ a huge percentage of their contractors who did translations,” the contractor wrote. “Of course this is because they figured out that AI can do these translations in a fraction of the time. Plus it saves them money.”
The contractor claims to have worked at Duolingo for five years in a four-member team. But now the team has been cut in half as AI has taken over the duties of generating content and translation for courses on Duolingo. “The two who remained will just review AI content to make sure it’s acceptable,” the contractor added.
A Duolingo spokesperson tells PCMag, "these are not layoffs," since the contractors were "offboarded as their projects wrapped up at the end of 2023."
"While we do use AI for many different purposes at Duolingo, including the generation of some course content, human experts are still very involved in the creation of Duolingo’s content," the spokesperson added. "I also want to note that we attempted to find alternate roles for each contractor before off-boarding as a last resort."
On Reddit, the job cuts at Duolingo are sparking debate over whether the company is justified in tapping AI to replace the human-led work. There are growing fears around generative AI taking jobs away from humans. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other chatbots have shown that the technology can write articles, create professional-looking art, narrate content with a variety of voices, and even program computer code. Hence, it’s possible that current and future AI programs could replace a large variety of jobs, enriching corporations.