Why should you be careful with AI?
How does Duolingo’s "failure" on AI strategies inspire you?
Have you come across this experience? Reading through social media, found most of the posts are obviously LLM-produced. This seems to be the trend: social media platforms like ‘LinkedIn’ and ‘X’ have AI integrated for writing posts.
A frustrating feeling always comes to me — the internet is full of robots — the truly valuable information is hiding behind this chaos of AI-generated waste posts, and it is more and more difficult for people to find real connection on the internet, the ‘real human connect’.
Last night, I decided to give a try at generating context with generative AI on my social media before I turn this option permanently down; I asked it to generate a short LinkedIn post on how AI impacts our daily life.
“🤖 How AI Touches Our Everyday Lives
From personalized recommendations on Netflix to voice assistants like Siri and smart email filters — AI is everywhere. It’s transforming how we work, shop, communicate, and even stay healthy.
Whether it's automating mundane tasks at work or helping us navigate traffic with real-time updates, AI isn’t just the future — it’s already deeply woven into our present.
The key? Understanding how to leverage AI responsibly to make our lives simpler, smarter, and more efficient.
#ArtificialIntelligence #TechInDailyLife #Innovation #FutureOfWork #AIimpact“
[Generated by ChatGPT model GPT-4o]
Turned out it sounds like many posts on LinkedIn. The content looks perfectly fine, but something is wrong: it reads out weirdly, and it is difficult to raise people’s interest.
If we look into the reason for the strange feeling, the drawback of this post is clear. AI models are trained on publicly available text, which means they often produce “safe,” formulaic language. As a person, your unique perspective and emotion expressed through tone can get diluted.
Additionally, AI models learn from existing online content, including biased or insensitive language. Your post therefore cannot inform people of any innovative idea and definitely appears like a stack of ‘facts’ instead of inspiring ideas.
The AI-generated post and content are just a small use by individuals; what about companies executing “Shift AI” strategies? Is AI ready to replace people?
Is AI ready to take over charge?
This is not the only example showing the signals that AI is not ready to replace all of us. Duolingo, a popular language-learning app known for its gamified approach and painless study process, recently experienced resistance to a transformation to AI-based strategies.
April 28, Duolingo shared an email from CEO Luis von Ann, announcing Duolingo is “Going to be AI-first“, adding that it is replacing contract workers with artificial intelligence.
"AI is already changing how work gets done. It's not a question of if or when. It's happening now," Ahn's email reads. "When there's a shift this big, the worst thing you can do is wait."
Throughout the email, Ahn describes how Duolingo will transition to becoming a more AI-focused company, including not using "contractors to do work that AI can handle."
This internal memo explained that future hiring would emphasise AI expertise, staff performance reviews would include AI usage, and some contract roles might be automated by AI tools
Immediate Backlash from Users
Almost immediately, longtime learners speak against it on social medias. Many users—some with streaks exceeding 1,000 days—deleted the app in protest, citing:
Perceived Decline in Lesson Quality: Reports of inconsistent or incorrect content (particularly in less common courses like Irish or Japanese) led users to fear AI was producing wrong exercises without proper human oversight.
Audio/Voiceover Glitches: AI-generated voiceovers in Duolingo’s premium “Duolingo Max” tier were described as robotic or error-prone, undermining trust in the platform’s teaching quality.
Loss of Community Support: Earlier, Duolingo had offered user forums for course feedback; these were replaced with AI-driven explanations, leaving some learners feeling they no longer had a human path to report mistakes.
Many users expressed that the company’s rush to scale via AI seemed to compromise the “human touch” they’d come to rely on. Many social‐media influencers and content creators publicly urged followers to “delete the app,” amplifying the uproar.
Growing Investor Confidence
However, Duolingo’s stock price climbed above $500 per share (as of June, 2025), after the claim of “Shift to AI“, signalling that investors believe the AI pivot will drive future growth and profitability even if it cost the lost of some core users.
Duolingo’s move reflects a wider tech‐industry trend: companies encouraging employees to adopt AI tools and automating tasks formerly done by contractors. While executives frame AI as an “augmentation” tool, workers and users often see it as a cost‐cutting measure that may erode quality and jobs. Duolingo’s experience has become a cautionary tale: even in a gamified, community‐driven space, swift AI adoption can fracture user trust if not managed transparently.
Although Duolingo’s AI strategies have been supported by investors—sending the stock price higher—it is worth asking whether that increase in stock price truly reflects the user’s interest in Duolingo. The loss of long-time learners and new learners is not captured by the stock rise. Rapidly replacing human contractors and community forums with AI-driven alternatives may reduce costs in the short term, but it risks the real human connection that kept users engaged for thousands of days. It may reduce the motivation for users to keep using this app.
A more gradual, transparent transformation—where AI empowers rather than replaces human moderators and contributors—could have kept user trust and prevented the loss of long-time learners. In other words, boosting efficiency and profitability shouldn’t require sacrificing the human touch that underpins Duolingo’s community.
By integrating AI incrementally—collecting user feedback, maintaining channels for human-driven course corrections, and ensuring that expert educators continue to create new content—the company could have achieved a healthier balance between innovation and the relationships that motivated users to stay in the first place.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, AI is a powerful tools that can accelerate workflows, enhance creativity and unlock new opportunities, but there is something it will never achieve. While AI can analyse large datasets, generate drafts, or automate repetitive tasks, it cannot yet grasp the deeper cultural context, exercise genuine moral reasoning, or create the real emotional connections that underpin trust and innovation.
As an individual creator or a company, you should therefore lean into your uniquely human strengths—empathy, intuition, critical thinking, and ethical accountability.
Only by valuing and integrating human qualities with AI’s capabilities, you ensure that technology becomes a force for responsible, meaningful progress rather than a replacement for the unique attributes that define our work and our world.
Justin Ju
| AI Engineer at Chelsea AI Venture | justin@chelseaai.co.uk |
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