This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Company replaces humans with AI.
Consumers notice a drop in quality and stop using the product
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.
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.
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.
You may want to check and see what your local library offers for language learning services, some provide Rosetta Stone to card holders free.
Pimsleur. It's very different than Duolingo, in that it is almost entirely audio-based. However, at least in my experience, it actually gets you to the point of speaking and understanding a language much more rapidly than Duolingo. Way, way less gamified though. It expects you to put in half an hour a day where you just concentrate on the lesson.
I am strongly pro-AI, but right now I would say it's not as good as a one-on-one experience with a knowledgeable human teacher. A human teacher can still see where you are struggling and help you work through the difficulty. Right now AI can belch out a correct answer, even write entire essays and computer programs, but can't as easily work with you one and one, read your body language, see the confusion in your eyes, and help you understand the thing you don't understand.
But it will happen. Eventually we will get AI-powered androids. I can't wait for the day I get my fembot, with a body built for loving and a head full of all the knowledge of the internet, able to teach me anything I want, help me with my studies, teach me new skills, and also cook and clean. Life will drastically change for the better for all us miserable antisocials, social rejects, and autists.
If, IF that were to happen so you think the average person would be able to afford an android maid/sex slave? Because if you think so I have a bridge to sell you.
Can I also have sex with this bridge?
Sure. Gonna cost you extra, though.
Right now I can't afford a car. The USA is over 30 trillion dollars in debt and can't provide quality employment for its own citizens, yet keeps importing illegals in mass because our business owners are desperate to exploit people for less than minimum wage.
We're heading towards a collapse at full speed, with or without AI. I think a collapse is necessary. The current system so completely corrupt and self-serving and causes so much harm for the majority of our citizens that I think the best thing to do is burn it to the ground and start over with something different.
All I can say, is that I take note that humans seem inherently unable to govern themselves effectively. Our history is a long line of failed nations and we have never built a government that won't collapse into bloody revolution. We have never built an economy that won't concentrate all wealth into the hands of a despot or oligarch, and we have never had truly compassionate government that actually cares about the people. Nor do I think we have ever had true representative government, and that every republic has worn the veil of democracy all the while empowering a class of super-wealthy oligarchs.
I think there is merit in creating a new government run by AI. No emotion, no greed, no smug self-entitlement. No scorn for the lower classes. No institutionalized classism. A government run by entities that operate according to pure reason. It would be the closest thing to Plato's original vision for a society run by philosophers.
OK, but what exactly does that have to do with what I said?
the part about people being able to afford things?
In other news: AI is a better human than Duolingo CEO
I'm sick of these techbro dickheads thinking they're an expert on everything just because they've got money.
Plus they basically have advanced degrees in enshittification
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
So... you're saying that a positive learning environment is better than a terrible one? The AI part is ancillary to the scenarios you set up, isn't it?
"AI is better than having the student learn in a terrible learning environment."
"A homeless alcoholic is a better language teacher than having a student learn in a classroom whilst being beaten about the head with a stick."
You're saying AI is better than a bad teacher. Maybe a bad AI is worse than a bad teacher, and maybe a good teacher is better than the best AI. I just don't know how setting up such a comparison is constructive.
That example may be bad, but it's also typical.
What? Teachers hating their subject?
They didn't say "hating their subject". They said "might not like their syllabus", which could just mean they'd prefer a different syllabus.
Huh. My cousin is a professor, and my best friend is a high school teacher. They're both responsible for developing their curriculum. That's only an n=2, but it's 100% that if they (the people I know) hate their curriculum, it's their own damned fault.
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.
