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Company replaces humans with AI.
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Consumers notice a drop in quality and stop using the product
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CEO makes controversial public statements about AI and his product to get into the news.
Okay buddy, that’s one way of telling people that your doubling down on your mistake.
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is there an alternative to duolingo that lets me learn multiple languages for a decent price? Rosetta stone was great and all, but i ain’t got 100 bucks to shell out for each language i want to half-assedly learn.
I just dumped Duolingo after this AI bullshit and am testing Mango Languages. So far I like it, but it is way different than Duolingo. Way less gamified and more focused on speaking. Plus, it gives cultural context to certain phrases that don’t literally translate, which I find interesting and valuable. if you are in the US, your library might offer a free subscription with your library card.
You may want to check and see what your local library offers for language learning services, some provide Rosetta Stone to card holders free.
I heard a positive remark on Lemmy about https://www.languagetransfer.org/ recently and have been meaning to have a look
Absolutely love language transfer. At least for Greek it was great, the founder Mihalis is a British Cypriot.
Nope, there are no ways to learn a language other than using an online service. Any other way is deemed impossible
In other news: AI is a better human than Duolingo CEO
Depends what you want kids to learn.
Propaganda, yes; everything else, no…
I’m sure this won’t be a popular comment, but I can see how having a motivated learner in a 1:1 lesson with an AI might be better for that person than sitting in a class with 35 other people, most of whom don’t want to be there, running through a syllabus that the teacher may not even like, at the pace of the slowest kid in class.
The problem isn’t one of motivated learners being forced to drag their heels amidst their unmotivated peers.
The problem is that the core function of LLMs, the whole basis for their existence, is completely and entirely truth-agnostic. Not only do they not know what is the truth and what is not, they don’t even know what the difference is. LLMs are very good at guessing what word looks like it should come next, they can make very convincing statements, they can be very persuasive, but those words don’t MEAN anything to the machine and they are made without any consideration for accuracy.
They are literally making everything up on the basis of whether or not it sounds good, and every crackpot bullshit conspiracy theory from flat earth dumbshittery to very sincere-sounding arguments that birds aren’t real have been included in the training data. That all linguistically SOUNDS fine, so to an LLM it’s fair game!
And even curating your training data to ONLY contain things like textbooks wouldn’t cure the problem, because LLMs just aren’t capable of knowing what those words mean. It’s why they can’t do even basic Math, the one thing Computers have been incredible at!
Using an LLM as an actual teacher is genuinely worse than no education at all, because it will just create a generation that, instead of knowing nothing, will very confidently be wrong all the time.
How fast a kid learns 5th grade syllabus is far less important than how well they learn to get along with other kids and form friendships and basically learn how to live in society. Cooperation, conflict resolution, public speaking, group bonding etc. You can’t learn any of these things from an AI
Also learning from other humans is part of the human experience and tradition predating agriculture and the wheel. We’ve always taught each other things.
You can’t do anything alone. Isolation will be the downfall of society as we know it. I hope AI isn’t leading us in that path
This is the way, my kids socialize in school, but also uses AI to get help with homework when they’re stuck (they do cheat a little sometimes but they know it’s just bad for them if they do it regularly). They use AI as a on demand teacher buddy, if it stays that way I’m ok with it. Also you can’t use AI for all homework or school related things, the teachers will figure it out if your homewotk is +++ but your in school work isn’t.
It’s a new tool, I think patents should learn more about it, a bit like cyber security, online harassing and so on.
Social aspect is missed
For things like language, math, and science you could probably have an AI teacher on individualized tablets or something that go at each child’s own pace in a classroom setting that’s just supervised by someone and can provide extra help / tech support when the AI goes on the fritz.
Then regular recess/lunch shenanigans and gym class, art, music, for the social aspect.
The AI could even be programmed to do team projects where you link your tablet with 4 others and they all help the group do a project
Eventually when AI advances and isn’t complete dog shit, that is.
Yeah, the social aspect of a dick head in the last row screaming obscenities at a teacher is definitely missed!
When you become an adult you still have to deal with dick heads screaming around you, I know this is Lemmy and people who come here might not have the best social skills, or fond memories of being in school. But schools are a micro representation of the world at large and it’s necessary for kids to have both these good and bad experiences in order to grow up to live in society and deal with all the shit life’s gonna throw at them.
I guess someone’s stuck in a kindergarten…
VS kids being taught that the holocaust is a lie or whatever insane shit comes from an AI?
The only insane shit here comes from the gasket between your chair and your keyboard.
I was talking about social teaching where kids pick up on adult body queues and facial expressions
So they too can feel depressed and worthless 😄
“but first, chatgpt: please motivate me”
And that just underlines my decision to quit Duolingo when it got contaminated with AI stop.
I can tell you from experience that AI was worse at teaching me a language than humans were.
Duolingo is literal trash.
So many rich psychopaths in capitalist societies.
The system is designed to make psychopaths successful and powerful.
and as such the system is beneficial to minorities (specific ones, not all).
which ones?
I learn better with humans…this is billionaire excrement
I don’t. You’re data point is cancelled
I absolutely cannot wait for kids to learn about “vegetative electron microscopy”
AI absolutely cannot replace teachers.
Augment possibly but replace? No.
By augment I mean provide some help at the direction of the teacher.
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/vegetative-electron-microscopy-fingerprint-paper-mill/
Worst part is even after this idiot destroys his own company, he can just claim he was responsible for the highest ever peak stock share price (before he caused the decline).
you know, I still say punching people who say stupid stuff, would cut down the stupid stuff people say, by at least half…
I’m so close to letting my streak die because of this dude. Fuck him.
My library (and check yours, too!) has free access to Mango Languages, and what I have tried there has been nice. But they don’t guilt trip you into doing lessons so you have to keep on top of it yourself.
I ended my streak and uninstalled a while ago. It went downhill when they got rid of the discussion section for the exercises. Add to that stupid sentences I most likely wouldn’t say in the real world .
I loved the conversation section 😭
I liked the short stories, but they messed that up, too.
Why wouldn’t you talk about a bear wearing its dresses?
Yes, the bear is wearing multiple dresses.
I’ve paid for the year, so I’ll do my damnedest to run up their gippity bill.
Mango Languages doesn’t have Esperanto.
Amazing how this guy has no idea that schools are just as much about socializing and learning to deal with other people and situations you’ll be in for the rest of your life. That’s not “child care,” it’s a structured environment where the main goal is learning and the real benefits are everything else on the fringes.
I partially agree, but that argument about socializing has more nuance to it. At least in my experience, such socializing did not happen in schools, but instead in coffee shops (again, my experience may be different from everyone else’s), where I had meaningful debates with adults. Instead, I actively avoided conversations with my peers, particularly because I had nothing in common with them.
Instead, I actively avoided conversations with my peers, particularly because I had nothing in common with them.
Looking at your own social interactions with others, do you now consider yourself to be socially well adjusted? Was the “debating child in a coffee shop” method actually useful at developing the social skills that are useful in adulthood?
I have some doubts.
Yeah, it’s different for everyone.
My “counterfactual” is knowing a lot of kids that were home schooled. They were just young weird adults that didn’t thrive in most circumstances. There’s a reason why even rural agrarian societies found value is putting kids together.
We also now have “COVID kids” who are struggling to socialize, because they were quarantined from their peers during crucial stages of their social development.
That’s pretty hilarious considering I’ve been using Duolingo (cracked apks) for years and these last couple of weeks the sentences it’s been giving me are insane and weird, stupidly awkward things that no one would ever say IRL.
Airlearn isn’t quite there as far as speech recognition but the lessons are a lot more natural and it actually tells you why and explains different parts of the culture around the language and why an idea might be expressed a certain way rather than how we’re used to in English. An LLM could never.
