Anna Fitzpatrick is a writer based in Toronto.
My love for the gamified language learning app Duolingo is so well documented it has become something of an inside joke with my friends. I first wrote about it in 2017. By that point, I had been a faithful user of the app for four years, and had finished their French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Spanish courses. (I’ve since completed another half dozen; and no, I have not attained fluency in all these languages.)
I originally began to do their bite-sized language lessons as an alternative to mind-numbing social-media platforms. While I was adamant to anyone who asked that fluency could not come from playing a game for 15 minutes a day, it did inspire more rigorous language study on my end: I took out textbooks from the library, paid for sessions with online tutors, watched foreign films I might not otherwise have been exposed to.
I was able to speak broken Hindi to an auntie and broken-er Swahili to my brother-in-law, read Russian script with ease, and brought myself to some level of fluency in Italian and German. During the first year of the pandemic, I used Duolingo’s online events feature (in which users could easily host or browse Zoom events, organized by language) to organize a weekly French film club. Users from at least four different continents logged on to discuss the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Claire Denis and Ousmane Sembène.
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My public love affair with Duolingo ended in mid-2023, several months after they had shut down the events feature. In April of that year, The New Yorker published a profile of Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn, which outlined how Duolingo had started to incorporate artificial intelligence in its course design, and how they were laying off human teachers in the process. (Full disclosure: I was hired to do some freelance copywriting for the company in January, 2022. I was not hired back after completing my initial contract, and as far as I know, that decision had nothing to do with their use of AI.)
I wrote a letter to the editor in response to the article, which the magazine published. I said that I was saddened to see language learning being reduced solely to an economic tool, and outlined other reasons a person might learn a language: curiosity about a different culture, an appreciation for certain art forms, and a desire to connect with people whom you might otherwise never meet.
Two years later, on April 28, 2025, it became official. A post written by Mr. von Ahn and posted publicly to Duolingo’s LinkedIn page announced that Duolingo was going to become an AI-first company. Per the post, they planned on gradually stopping using contractors to do work that AI can handle, and explained that with AI, “teaching as well as the best human tutors is within our reach.”
Giraffe.
This is not an essay about Duolingo. This is an essay about how artificial intelligence has embedded itself into yet another thing that I loved, and made it worse. It’s a story that has recurred so many times, it almost seems unfair to single Duolingo out; at the height of my language learning mania, I cycled through many different apps and online tools, and most of them have also incorporated AI to some extent.
AI has been similarly tearing through each and every creative industry, from art to film to literature with increasing competence that I have found myself fooled by AI-generated imagery more than once. People have outsourced basic cognitive functions to ChatGPT, asking the generative chatbot to draft wedding vows or treating it like a substitute therapist (or lover).
There are compelling arguments to be made for the use of AI as a revolutionary assistive tool in medical development, or computer programming, or as an accessibility aid. I myself have used it as a writer to transcribe my interviews.
I am deeply troubled by AI’s environmental impacts (larger AI data centres can consume up to 5 million gallons of freshwater a day) and labour impacts (Duolingo is not the only company to replace a human work force with AI; just last week, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and current CEO of Block, announced the fintech company was cutting 4,000 of the company’s 10,000 positions, telling shareholders that “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company”). But these concerns are not exclusive to AI. Workers have always fought to oppose their own displacement in the face of new technologies, though despite their heroic struggles, we still use “Luddite” as a pejorative.
AI is uniquely disturbing to me because of how it threatens to usurp our basic shared humanity. Proponents of using it as a replacement for creative work have argued that it is a democratizing tool. Now, a person no longer needs to study for years to create a beautiful image, or compose a song, or write a novel.
But art has always been a democratic process. There have been institutional barriers in its production and distribution, but this hasn’t stopped the proliferation of folk songs, or cave paintings, or doodles produced on the corners of notebooks, or letters exchanged between lovers.
Pig in the sun under a cloud.
When my three-year old niece scribbles with her broken crayons on a piece of paper and calls it “a pig in the sun under a cloud,” she is producing an image that is perhaps less coherent or realistic than what ChatGPT could output in a matter of seconds, but it’s still her artwork that I stick on the fridge. The process is the point.
Which is why Duolingo’s development felt particularly heartbreaking. The initial app, launched in 2013 by Mr. von Ahn and Severin Hacker, was a product, but it was one that intended to facilitate free education around the world.
Most of the language courses that the app introduced were created by unpaid users through a now-defunct feature called the Incubator. I never had the existing skill set in another language to be much useful in the creation of a course, but I frequented the (also now defunct) Duolingo forums as we speculated around the release dates of certain languages the way Swifties might speculate around an album release.
Early versions of the app did feature advertising, and in 2017 they introduced an ad-free version for paid subscribers. Some criticized the crowdsourced model for its exploitative nature, but the chatter I heard amongst the people on the forums, including by those who worked on the courses, was supportive: Apps cost money to run, after all, and the mission of free language education is a noble one.
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As I participated in the larger online language learning community through messaging platforms such as Tumblr and Reddit, I was also a staunch defender of Duolingo against its polyglot critics who (correctly) argued that the app’s gamified lessons couldn’t compare to good old-fashioned rigorous study.
Duolingo was meant to complement other forms of study, I told them, while serving as an alternative for social-media apps run by exploitative tech billionaires. Duolingo offered a dopamine-inducing distraction on our phones, without exploiting it to reap a profit.
Look. I was young.
Duolingo’s pivot to AI came a couple years after the company became a publicly traded company in 2021, several months after shutting down the Language Incubator. In doing so, the app followed almost to a T a process that the Canadian writer Cory Doctorow has dubbed “enshittification.”
Per Mr. Doctorow, enshittification follows three steps: First, a platform is good to their users (in Duolingo’s case, the language learners). Then they abuse their users to make things better for their customers (often advertisers). Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. (The ad-supported version of Duolingo is now almost unusable, pushing users to sign up for ad-free Super Duolingo, or the more expensive AI-powered Duolingo Max.)
At first, shareholders were thrilled with Duolingo’s decisions – the stock increased 275.2 per cent over a period of three years.
AI, at least in the way that Duolingo introduced it, has undoubtedly managed to save the company untold value by replacing both those expensive, human labourers (as well as those free workers upon which Duolingo very reasonably understood that they could not continue to depend to build their courses while surpassing a million paid subscribers in 2020; though after the Incubator shut down, many previous volunteers were reportedly hired as contractors).
But the company’s stock is down more than 60 per cent over the last six months, and continued to slide last week. Analysts don’t believe it’s related to the company’s recent embrace of AI, but I can’t help be suspicious of the timing.
Shoo-be-do-bar.
I am conscious of being a cynic. I have been able to acknowledge that AI can have value, and even save lives, when used responsibly in fields of medicine, conservation, disaster response, and elsewhere. In an era marked by both rabid xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment, and a global refugee crisis, is language learning not life or death?
Less than a month after Duolingo made their LinkedIn post announcing their pivot to AI, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer held a press conference announcing that Britain will implement new English language requirements for immigrants. Simultaneously, Duolingo was announcing that, thanks to generative AI, they were able to launch 148 new language courses, more than doubling their current offering. Most of these courses were not targeted toward native English speakers; Duolingo’s base app is available in 28 different languages, and English remains the most popular language learned on the app in at least 130 countries.
Duolingo founder Luis von Ahn was born in Guatemala. According to that New Yorker profile, Mr. Von Ahn had wanted to go to the United States for university, but first he was required to pass an English proficiency test. He was required to fly to El Salvador to take the test. He understood, in a way that I never can, how language learning can be both widely inaccessible and a pathway to a better life. There is an ever-growing cohort of people who need to learn a language, and it’s not so they can better appreciate the films of Truffaut.
I have never had to prove my English proficiency to anyone. I was born in Ottawa and raised speaking both national languages, thanks to an extensive public education in French immersion. I learn languages as a hobbyist. I am someone with enough free time to watch art films, study for fun, and occasionally take an overseas vacation where I can practise my flimsy Italian at the tourist sites. I can get indignant about the AI takeover of my once-favourite app because I have never had to learn a language to survive.
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While I can’t judge anyone who might depend on AI to learn a language, all of this is dependent on the question of whether or not AI can be used to teach a language, at least in the way that Duolingo has employed it.
In an interview with the The Wall Street Journal, Duolingo’s chief technology officer Severin Hacker claimed that the best way to learn anything is one-on-one with a human tutor. I agree! The languages I learned as an adult – actually learned – happened not through Duolingo lessons but with online conversation partners, many of whom I met through Duolingo-hosted events, or else hired at a cost way higher than what Duolingo charges for its paid tiers.
To see if AI could actually help learn a language, I recently signed up for a free weekly trial of Duolingo Max. (Duolingo Max, which offers the AI features, goes for about $30 a month in Canada; Super Duolingo, the basic ad-free tier, is about $10 a month.) Duolingo Max’s AI features are not yet available for every language, but they were offered for Japanese, the language I had been learning on the app (and nowhere else) for the better part of a year.
The app gave me the option to conduct a “video chat” with Lily, their purple-haired teenaged animated character. I couldn’t understand a word Lily was saying, and my answers were likewise incomprehensible. I switched my active language to Italian and tried video chat again. This time, Lily and I had a full conversation. She asked me about hobbies and I said I liked watching movies, particularly films by Federico Fellini. She acknowledged he was one of Italy’s best, and asked if I preferred Otto e Mezzo or La Dolce Vita.
It was fun, I’ll admit it. But to get to a point where I could have a 90-second conversation with Lily in Italian, I had used a number of those other non-Duolingo resources. Duolingo Max’s $30-a-month price tag might be more accessible than an immersion course, but I can’t imagine that a person already in possession of the computer or smartphone required to access Duolingo wouldn’t be better off accessing any of the scores of free online language learning tools that have been proven to be more effective, if less flashy. I suppose its only a matter of time before those other resources become enshittified by AI as well.
As of writing this, my Duolingo streak is at 3,137 days. I’m unlikely to abandon the app any time soon. I worked too hard to get it to that number, and besides, I still love the rush that comes with seeing that number increase as I finish my daily lesson. I am seduced by the easy rewards. I am, after all, only human.
Space guy.