Duolingo doubles down on AI amid controversy

Duolingo is doubling down on its promise to use artificial intelligence (AI) in all aspects of its operations, telling Bloomberg that it plans to greatly expand its course offerings.

Duolingo’s Chief Financial Officer Matt Skaruppa told Bloomberg that the company is planning to use AI to expand the range of courses available on the platform.

Skaruppa said that Duolingo is using AI “in ways” to generate “massively more content” than the company could previously create, to build a “human tutor in your pocket.”

The popular language learning app launched 148 courses in April, all of which were developed using AI.

This doubled the number of foreign language courses for non-native English speakers, Bloomberg reports.

Earlier this month, Duolingo’s CEO, Luis von Ahn, announced plans to become an “AI-first” company, and with that comes the gradual phasing out of contractors.

In an “all-hands email” posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn account, the CEO said that AI will help the company get “closer to its mission” by creating a “massive amount of content,” and doing that manually “doesn’t scale.”

“One of our best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI,” von Ahn said in the email.

But this hasn’t come without controversy, as many social media users, including Duolingo’s own social media team, were outraged by the changes, with many people saying they were ditching the app.

“I'm watching Duolingo get ruined, and begging users to keep using their app is heartwarming. It’s almost like humans have empathy towards others losing their jobs from exploitative AI,” one user said on X.

Another user explained that they’re deleting their Duolingo app as “the quality is no longer there” and they “do not support their AI first (profit first) new mission statement.”

“Me watching what announcing AI has done to Duolingo’s brand… If you’re thinking about using AI-generated creators, you may want to rethink that.”

In an odd move, Duolingo deleted all of its TikTok videos from the platform, leaving just one, a bizarre message for the company’s CEO.

This is most likely another media stunt, similar to the time when Duolingo killed off its famous mascot, Duo the Owl.