It's wild for the CEO of an edutainment company to have this much disdain for for teachers.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Oh god, so many horror quotes in there.
With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn
...and that's why I try to avoid using smartphone apps as much as possible.
“Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,”
How about common sense..
“it’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.”
Ugh. So terrible. Tech's obsession with "scaling" is one of the worst things about tech.
If “it’s one teacher and like 30 students, each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student,” he said. “But the computer can.
No, it cannot. It's a statistical model, it cannot give attention to anything or anyone, what are you talking about.
Duolingo’s CFO made similar comments last year, saying, “AI helps us replicate what a good teacher does”
Did this person ever have a good teacher in their life
the company has essentially run 16,000 A/B tests over its existence
Aaaarrgh. Tech's obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Ok I stop here now, there's more, almost every paragraph contains something horrible.
Not really. If schools aren't spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.
Urgh over the past month I have seen more and more people on social media using chat-gpt to write stuff for them, or to check facts, and getting defensive instead of embarrassed about it.
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud -- but I'd lie if I said I wasn't worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud
Yell at cloud computing instead, that is usually justified.
More seriously: it's not at all that. The AI pushers want to make people feel that way -- "it's inevitable", "it's here to stay", etc. But the threat to learning and maintaining skills is real (although the former worries me more than the latter -- what has been learned before can often be regained rather quickly, but what if learning itself is inhibited?).
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population
AI's already destroying people's cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn't be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it'll fuck up human's capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.
(and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Thankfully, I've managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:
- AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
- The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
- The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since you'd have zero shot of turning a profit.
(That I'm a NEET also helps (can't have AI bro coworkers if you're unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)
can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P
I'd certainly feel less conflicted yelling about AI if I didn't work for a big tech company that's gaga for AI. I almost wrote out a long angsty reply but I don't want to give up too much personal details in a single comment.
I guess I ended up as a boiled frog. If I knew how much AI nonsense I'd be incidentally exposed to over the last year I would have quit a year ago. And yet currently I don't quit for complicated reasons. I'm not that far from the breaking point, but I'm going to try to hang in for a few more years.
But yeah, I'm pretty uncomfortable working for a company that has also veered closer to allying with techo-fascism in recent years; and I am taking psychic damage.
new Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php
also featuring our old friend Zack Davis
“LaSota also bragged to me (my interpretation, I admit) that her theory must be cool because it had had a huge effect on her friend Chris/Maia Pasek,” Salamon said in an email. “Namely, it had (according to LaSota) caused Pasek to kill themself.”
"people commit suicide after meeting me" is a weird thing to brag about
The reader mode in Firefox shows completely different version of the article, weird. I never understood how that feature works, is there some node that contains the site supplied version of text for that mode?
That's the same article, it just skips title but leaves subtitle
Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:
You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consent's off the table right from the get-go.
If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRA's essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect that's their goal here.
My opinion of Microsoft has gone through many stages over time.
In the late 90s I hated them, for some very good reasons but admittedly also some bad and silly reasons.
This carried over into the 2000s, but in the mid-to-late 00s there was a time when I thought they had changed. I used Windows much more again, I bought a student license of Office 2007 and I used it for a lot of uni stuff (Word finally had decent equation entry/rendering!). And I even learned some Win32, and then C#, which I really liked at the time.
In the 2010s I turned away from Windows again to other platforms, for mostly tech-related reasons, but I didn't dislike Microsoft much per se. This changed around the release of Win 10 with its forced ~~spyware~~ ~~privacy violation~~ telemetry since I categorically reject such coercion. Suddenly Microsoft did one of the very things that they were wrongly accused of doing 15 years earlier.
Now it's the 2020s and they push GenAI on users with force, and then they align with fascists (see link at the beginning of this comment). I despise them more now than I ever did before, I hope the AI bubble burst will bankrupt them.
That reminds me, remember there is an Xbox boycott going on for all the gamers out there. (Saw that after the boycot was started, both steam and humble pushed xbox game sales, the timing of which is very iffy).
We've had one AI legal filing yes, but what about second AI legal filing?
https://bsky.app/profile/debgoldendc.bsky.social/post/3lpjr7i6lrs2n
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.alnd.179677/gov.uscourts.alnd.179677.186.0.pdf
Instead, Defendant appears to have wholly invented case citations in his Motion for Leave, possibly through the use of generative artificial intelligence
Defendant bolstered this assertion with a lengthy string citation of legal authority and parentheticals that appeared to support Defendant’s proposition. But the entire string citation appears to have been made up out of whole cloth.
this makes me wonder how many spicy autocomplete fakes like that aren't caught
a shitload i expect. but checking authorities actually exist is probably gonna become an obvious thing to do lol
Scoot makes the case that agi could have murderbot factories up and running in a year if it wanted to https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kp3qdh/how_openai_could_build_a_robot_army_in_a_year/
edit: Wrote it up
A reminder that AI slop tastes like boots.
Seems it was deleted. But due to reddit being reddit I noticed it pointed towards the 'Swat Man: Volume 1 Kindle Edition' amazon link. (Which I have not reproduced here)
E: ah nevermind aggressive adblockers deleted it on my end.
Not deleted. It's just that the reddit programmers either DGAF or don't know what they're doing.
But yeah this one confused me. He appears to be a movie director / producer / writer and has a couple festival films under his belt. Nothing successful enough to get any buzz as far as I can tell.
Imagine working towards a Hollywood career for years and years only to write an AI-drawn comic book that, based on the title, misses the point of The Punisher. People he pitches his movie ideas to are going to assume he wrote the script with an LLM.
That gives me a 'you broke reddit' jackrobertsofficial is also empty for me (and empty if I use an incognito window, so I'm not blocked). I got the feeling that might be what was going on. Even if I had a hard time finding his old work, as the news articles he links on his own site were dead.
E: tried on my phone and it appears wtf, no wait. It is promoted, my addblockers just nuked it haha, my bad.