Duolingo announced plans this week to replace contractors with AI and become a company “AI-FIRST” – A movement that Journalist Brian Merchant said As a sign that the crisis of the work of AI “is here, now”.
In fact, Merchant spoke with a former Duolingo contractor who said this is not even a new policy. The company Cut about 10% of your contractor’s workforce At the end of 2023, and Merchant said there was another round of cuts in October 2024. In both cases, the contractors (first translators, then writers) were replaced by Ia.
The merchant also noticed reports in the Atlantic around The unusually high unemployment rate for recent university graduates. An explanation? Companies could be replacing white -collar entry collar work with AI, or their expenditure on AI could simply be “displacing” spending for new hiring.
This crisis, Merchant wrote, is really “a series of management decisions taken by executives who seek to reduce labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations”, and is being manifested as “wear and tear in creative industries, the decrease in the income of artists, writers and illustrators of corporations, and the inclination of corporations to simply less human workers.”
“The crisis of AI works is not any type of Skynet-Esque robot apocalypse, it is Dux shooting tens of thousands of federal employees While shaking the banner ‘An Ai-First’ strategy,“He added.