• ⁺₊✧ Beyond the Headlines ✧₊⁺
• 5/8/2025

Duolingo’s AI Shift Backfires, AI can’t Differentiate

Duolingo was on top of the world not that long ago. It felt like they could get away with anything. They spent lots of time and money building up their marketing presence online. Lots of people would agree that they re-invented the marketing game on social media. Then they went "Ai first" and just like that… they did irreparable damage to their brand image…. They are seeing A LOT of pushback from their users. There are tons of videos expressing their anger.

“AI-first” is NOT innovation. It’s a statement about their values and ethics.
If I wanted to talk to an incoherent bot, I’d just open up Facebook.
This change is going so well that loyal users are canceling subscriptions. 🔥

Duo is getting cooked in the comments even with home field advantage...💀
Just take a look at those ratios! They just barely posted this and the criticisms already have more likes than the video itself!
Duo who usually comments on everything is nowhere to be seen…

Why would Duolingo shoot themselves in the foot?

Duolingo “leaders” & more specifically Duolingo's CEO. Guatemalan entrepreneur and bias computer scientist Luis von Ahn claims “AI” is central to the company's future...

• Scalability and Speed:

  The Plagiarism machine has enabled Duolingo to launch 148 new slop courses in under a year! Now with only a ton of errors! In comparison, cringe flesh-bound humans are only able to produce 100 quality lessons! EWW, who wants good content anyway, it's all about d. brainrot am I rite?



• Cost Efficiency:

  By automating slop, Duolingo has reduced reliance on humans, aiming to improve profitability for their investor overlords! This is good for the users because it’s not. It’s not at all good for the users lmao.



• Dangling Keys! Ooo shiny:

  Duolingo Max offers users interactive new ways of burning time and money! Experiences, such as role-playing conversations and personalized feedback. Under the hood you have ChatGPT4.Ensuring sycophancy in every response! GLAZE IT TO THE LIMIT! :D

Duolingo’s CEO:

⚠️ Duolingo’s brand backlash ⚠️

Despite the advancements in Slop, Duolingo faced backlash for replacing humans and quality content with Slop. Now who could have guessed that people want to get their money’s worth? 🫨 Long time users are mad and for good reasons:

• ★ Job Displacement ★

  10% of contractors were replaced by Ai. Although to Duo's credit, they are still using humans. A better description would be that they are overworking their current workforce to replace contractors until they can replace all humans. Metal is the future and flesh is cringe.
– Data sourced from Washington Post



• ★ Quality Concerns ★

  By automating slop, Duolingo has reduced reliance on humans, aiming to improve profitability for their investor overlords! This is good for the users because it’s not. It’s not at all good for the users lmao.



• ★ Community Discontent ★

  Duolingo Max offers users interactive new ways of burning time and money! Experiences, such as role-playing conversations and personalized feedback. Under the hood you have ChatGPT4.Ensuring sycophancy in every response! GLAZE IT TO THE LIMIT! :D

Drawbacks of embracing technology that is not ready

★ Drawbacks in education ★

Duolingo's pivot to AI-first shows us the downfalls of embracing technology that is not yet ready. Especially when LLMs love to lie and hallucinate, education deserves better. Education is being hurt by Ai in many ways. There has already been studies backing up the claims that AI is making people dumb. It's killing people's critical thinking skills & if you never had that skill to begin with you won't be able to develop it relying on Ai. Even Microsoft agrees that Ai is making most people stupid. Just think about that...The people who directly benefit from you using Ai can't ignore the damage it's doing to people's brains. After Sam Altman made his statement about reducing the "glazing" in ChatGPT and I saw all the examples from users I just had to test it myself. You can give it the most unhinged rants and the stupidest ideas and IT STILL AGREES WITH YOU! This shit is dangerous! ChatGPT is seen as an authority figure by the youth! Gen Z is "cooked" as the kids would say.

AI Is Making You Dumber, Microsoft Researchers Say
"Specifically, a user’s confidence in GenAI is predictive of the extent to which critical thinking is exercised in GenAI-assisted tasks. Both our quantitative and qualitative results suggest that higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, as GenAI tools appear to reduce the perceived effort required for critical thinking"
- Article by Microsoft

★ Drawbacks in differentiation ★

Regarding brand image, Ai slop may have humans beat on scalability, but the absence of quality and differentiation can rot user trust the same way it rots their brain. Ai dilutes Duolingos brand image, hurting their chances at differentiation. They have an amazing marketing team and they have gotten Duolinog very far but event hey can't meme their way out of this one...

All CEOs who make the shift towards AI in their company keep saying they are "reducing costs" as the reason for the switch. However, CHATGPT is NOT profitable. It is only cheap right now, but that doesn’t mean AI is cheaper than humans. CEOs keep saying it’s “cheaper” and idk if they don’t realize OpenAI is not profitable yet or they don’t understand. Maybe they don’t want to understand. Not only is it way more expensive than humans but if it’s “central to the company's future…” The company won’t be able to plan for the future now that Openai has switched to for-profit mode. There is a lot of pushback on this, but we also have a lot of Ai fanboys who don't realize the implications of having OpenAi switch to "for-profit" after stealing the whole internet. This doesn't benefit humanity as a whole, only the corporation & investors.

It’s only a matter of time before they turn the switch, but even if they made it free. Relying on Ai will make your brand very generic over time. Hurting the perceived value, because other competitor apps can use Ai too and race them to the bottom trying to offer the cheapest and shitiest solutions possible. Leading to razor-thin margins and poor-quality content. Everyone loses except for LLMS because they sold you the shovel that ended up burying your business in the sea of ordinary. At the end of the day another business that uses Ai to sell cheaper than you is just an ad for AI & not actually “winning”.

★ What’s under the hood in Duolingos “Ai” ? ★

GPT-4 under the hood, so capabilities should be about the same right? Well, not exactly 1:1 with GPT-4 benchmarks because it's a wrapper. Meaning they modified it for a specific use. Duolingo prolly uses very specific prompts as guardrails. Resulting in overly generic slop that follows a formula even more boxed in than a raw GPT4 would be. This makes it harder to differentiate, and at one point the users would be better going straight to the source and talking to ChatGPT instead.

Why would Duolingo Nerf their Ai? & how does this nerfed Ai hurt their brand?

Duolingo has to prioritize clarity over creativity, making it harder to differentiate. Outputs get generic as fuck in the quest to play it safe. Features like Roleplay are intentionally nerfed to avoid “AI” generating inappropriate responses. Leading to the feeling of talking to a bot. If I wanted to talk to a bot I would just go on Facebook. less variety, less spontaneity = BOT DIALOGUE

Why should differentiation matter to your business?

★ Differentiation builds brand trust ★

Standing out isn't just an advantage, it's necessary for the survival of your business in the long run. According to Investopedia and basically anyone who understands brands,

★ With Ai slop around every corner, Brand image is more important than ever ★

As consumers are bombarded with countless slop, their loyalty goes to the unique brands that don't blend in with the generic crap. Automation leads to slop, speed comes at a price! making your brand indistinguishable from the rest of the slop in the sea of ordinary! Without that personal touch that resonates with audiences, your brand won’t be able to rise above the content flood!

The bar is on the ground and it's becoming very obvious after the Chibli trend. When only a handful of people used Ai, it seemed like some businesses had the upper hand. Now that even a toddler can make Ai slop it has devalued “Ai art”. Not a single generated image has been able to get copyright protection, meaning your business is not protected if you use Ai images, anyone can steal your Ai slop because it doesn't have Copyright protections. I know tech bros might say "oh yeah well everything is free, I can screenshot your work and you can't do anything about it!" which is the same as going into a grocery store and stealing food. Just because you can doesn't make it legal lmao. Any business that uses Ai in their marketing is automatically seen as low quality. It signals to your clients that your business is probably broke and can’t even afford to hire a freelancer off fiver so they just had a toddler do it with Ai.

It’s easier to destroy brand image than it is to fix it. Duo fumbled their reputation, but you don’t have to tumble down that path to learn the lesson.

More content ≠ better content
Automation ≠ strategy
Scaling slop ≠ innovation

Is your business considering the switch to automation focused?
Maybe try a real strategy first…😬 Making things cheaper always lands you in the red sea. Making ordinary products and fighting off sharks by slashing your profit margins like a mad man.