When Duolingo launched in 2012, the language-learning app grew to become the poster baby of gamification. The app is shameless and luxurious in its efforts to get customers hooked on classes with streaks, leaderboards, and timed challenges.
Many customers — together with me and my 1300-plus day streak — fell for Duolingo’s cartoon mascots and weird social media posts. The corporate has by no means been afraid to be belligerent in tone; Duo the owl is cute, however Duolingo has adopted a profitable technique of not coddling its customers. The app repeatedly sends me push notifications from my very own boyfriend begging me to not allow us to “break up” (our good friend streak). Look, it doesn’t not work.
However this spring, Duolingo had an enormous messaging misfire over AI adoption, and introduced much more customers near ending issues.
In April, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn introduced to staff that Duolingo could be going all-in on AI. The corporate would search for AI experience in future hires, and AI utilization could be evaluated in worker efficiency evaluations. It will additionally transfer to interchange contract employees with AI the place doable. It was this assertion that caught within the craw of many customers, and actually stunned me after I learn it. I’m cynically sure that loads of firms would love to interchange costly human employees with machines. Admitting it is one other factor.
The memo was a known as shot: Duolingo’s management sees AI as a paradigm shift, much like the adoption of cell phones within the 2010s. On the time, widespread knowledge would have dictated {that a} language-learning program ought to prioritize broadly adopted platforms like PCs. As an alternative, the corporate went “mobile-first.” That wager definitely paid off. Duolingo noticed 103 million customers a month in 2024. Now, it needs to go “AI-first.”
It’s too quickly to inform what the long-term results of the choice will likely be. However within the brief time period, fallout has been loud and indignant throughout social media. Longtime customers are deleting the app, destroying 1000+ day streaks. The announcement has been painted as a failure in a number of publications. The Duolingo subreddit melted down so totally that mods positioned a moratorium on posts about AI.
In the meantime, Duolingo inventory costs have soared to over $500 (as of June 2, 2025), indicating that no matter customers could really feel about AI, the large boys who shovel cash round assume it’s right here to remain.
Von Ahn later made a second assertion, not strolling again the “AI-first” shift, however couching it in gentler language.
“I don’t see AI as changing what our staff do,” he wrote. “I see it as a software to speed up what we do, on the similar or higher stage of high quality. And the earlier we discover ways to use it, and use it responsibly, the higher off we will likely be in the long term.”
Duolingo isn’t the one firm doing this. Throughout the tech business, employees are being evaluated on their AI utilization, inspired to experiment with AI instruments within the service of supposed future productiveness, and requested to coach their very own replacements.
It’s not being framed this fashion. Fairly, executives are talking about their AI initiatives like Luis von Ahn did: as instruments to assist individuals, reasonably than exchange them.
Duolingo’s AI shift has been brewing for years
After all, Duolingo has been inching in direction of “AI-first” for years. In 2023, it used OpenAI’s GPT-4 to create AI options which can be solely out there in Duolingo Max, the very best subscription tier on the app.
One in all these is “Clarify My Reply,” which ostensibly tells customers why their response to an train is improper. Normally, Duolingo gives you the proper reply when you get one thing improper, however it gained’t clarify why you have been improper. In terms of typos or misspellings, the error may be apparent. Nevertheless it doesn’t assist customers in the event that they’re essentially misunderstanding, say, a grammatical idea.
Beforehand, Duolingo hosted a discussion board the place customers might see explanations from different customers and native audio system instantly within the app. This was eliminated in 2022.
Now, the Duolingo subreddit is awash with customers searching for solutions to their questions. And plenty of of them are blaming AI for his or her confusion. It’s is the scapegoat for nonsensical conversations, translation errors, and simply plain awkward workout routines.
With out affirmation from Duolingo, it’s unimaginable to say which of those points is definitely brought on by Duolingo’s implementation of AI. In some circumstances, customers are genuinely encountering software program bugs reasonably than AI-created classes.
However elsewhere, AI has genuinely modified Duolingo’s classes for the more severe. In Aftermath, Riley MacCleod writes that the Irish course he was pursuing has been ruined by AI voices that don’t pronounce Irish phrases appropriately — a dire state of affairs for a language that’s actually endangered.
I spoke to Callie R., a former Duolingo consumer who’s studying Japanese. They observed that there was a mismatch between how phrases have been pronounced by the robotic voiceover in phrase banks, versus how those self same phrases have been pronounced in workout routines.
“That is simply a side of how Japanese is written, that it isn’t doable basically to inform how a kanji is meant to be pronounced if you see it in isolation,” Callie mentioned. “It is smart that an automatic content material technology course of would make this sort of mistake, however a human crew actively growing the course with studying outcomes in thoughts wouldn’t do that.”
In addition they pointed to observations from different customers that Duolingo’s robotic voice isn’t able to appropriately talking a Japanese pitch-accent, an important side of the language, and one {that a} native English speaker can’t simply decide up on.
“It wasn’t value actually studying the language improper on objective,” they mentioned.
After two years, Callie R. deleted the app and nuked their 700+ day streak.
AI must be good at this
The factor is, language studying is a area the place AI giant language fashions can really be helpful. These LLMs aren’t dependable truth-tellers, however they are often purposeful dialog companions.
Duolingo has lengthy been criticized for not successfully instructing customers learn how to converse — the app naturally focuses extra on studying and listening, and the “talking” classes are extra about pronunciation than they’re about actively recalling phrases from reminiscence. The latter is vital for real fluency in one other language.
Duolingo is making an attempt to handle that flaw with two extra Max-exclusive AI options that allow customers have conversations with Duolingo’s cartoon mascots. Essentially the most impactful of those is Video Name, the place customers can have a short “cellphone name” with Lily, Duolingo’s resident depressed goth lady.
I had some conversations with Lily throughout a Duolingo Max free trial earlier this 12 months. In every, she would ask me a query, repeat again to me what she had understood from my response, after which ask a easy follow-up. We talked about issues like what animals or fruits I appreciated, or how my trip was going. It pressured me to recall Italian vocabulary on the fly, with out a phrase financial institution to assist me out.
IMAGE: Duolingo by way of todaysviralmedia
That is an space the place LLMs excel: producing human language based mostly on speech patterns.
Sadly, LLMs fail in precisely the areas Duolingo is making an attempt to disrupt. In his Blood within the Machine publication, journalist Brian Service provider spoke with a former Duolingo worker whose job had gone from writing classes, to coaching AI learn how to write classes, to non-existent.
“We had been working with their AI software for some time, and it was completely not on the level of being able to writing classes with out people,” this worker informed Service provider.
For Duolingo’s management, the failings within the system are the price of what they see because the leading edge. Duolingo’s classes aren’t alleged to be good.
“We will’t wait till the know-how is 100% excellent,” von Ahn wrote in his e-mail to Duolingo staff. “We’d reasonably transfer with urgency and take occasional small hits on high quality than transfer slowly and miss the second.”
The customers who stay tapped into these conversations are struggling no small quantity of confusion. A current examine confirmed that admitting to AI utilization could cause individuals to belief you much less. That is the state of affairs that appears to be enjoying out on the Duolingo subreddit, the place customers are in a continuing battle to determine what’s AI and what isn’t.
Some are deleting the app like Callie R. did. However there’s a effervescent concern {that a} silent majority could merely not care and even concentrate on any of those points. The Duolingo subreddit has over 508,000 members — that’s lower than 5% of Duolingo’s reported 116 million month-to-month customers. And the subreddit itself isn’t totally anti-AI. Loads of customers settle for it, or just don’t assume there’s any level in combating the tide.
Duolingo’s AI coverage calls the app’s mission into query
My very own Duolingo utilization has all the time been predicated on one assumption: it gained’t harm your language-learning. Loads of ink has been spilled over the truth that Duolingo most certainly can’t make you fluent in one other language. Positive, I’ve all the time reasoned, I do know that. However doing a 5-minute Italian train daily after I’m too lazy or low-cost or unmotivated to hunt out a tutor is higher than nothing. I’m nonetheless studying, even when I’m not precisely leaping and bounding in direction of fluency.
However the inflow of AI content material places this justification in danger. In spite of everything, language college students don’t know what they don’t know.
“I don’t actually care that it’s AI so long as there’s oversight and somebody keen to tug the plug if it’s not producing actual Japanese,” Callie R. mentioned. As an alternative of pulling the plug, the individuals in cost at Duolingo are actively enabling customers to be taught dangerous Japanese, within the hopes that sometime the AI will train good Japanese as an alternative.
There’s no apparent street map is to get there. LLMs may be taught to talk a language — it’s not clear that they are often taught to train.
Duolingo
Duolingo is going through an issue of scale: it needs to supply a number of language programs, and creating these programs takes money and time. It has turned to AI to fill the determined gaps the place people is perhaps proper, however can by no means be quick sufficient.
What makes Duolingo’s AI creep much more nefarious is that it’s most certainly to have an effect on languages with smaller userbases — like Irish or Navajo, each endangered languages. The overwhelming majority of the app’s customers are learning English, French, or Spanish. These are the programs that see an actual funding of sources.
Duolingo will get nice press for creating classes that purport to familiarize customers with Navajo. However what is going to occur if AI is used to “scale up” the Navajo program, with seemingly few human guardrails to make sure that the workout routines are appropriate?
“With out AI, it will take us a long time to scale our content material to extra learners,” von Ahn wrote in his first assertion. “We owe it to our learners to get them this content material ASAP.”
My query is… why? Why do we’d like extra content material for customers instantly, when that content material is perhaps improper or of low high quality? It’s right here that Duolingo’s mission of constructing language accessible crashes headlong into its function as a publicly traded firm. Classes have to scale in order that customers keep on the app, in order that the app can earn money.
Truly studying a language — and even merely treading water in a single — doesn’t have a component to play.