Duolingo announced this week it plans to replace contractors with AI and become an “AI-First” company. This is a move that journalist Brian Merchant pointed out by AI Jobs Crisis as a sign that it is “here and here.”
In fact, the merchant spoke to a former Duolingo contractor. The company cut about 10% of its contractors’ labor force at the end of 2023, and merchants said there would be another round of cuts in October 2024. In both cases, the contractor (first translator, then the writer) was replaced by AI.
The merchant also noted that he is reporting in the Atlantic, with a focus on the unusually high unemployment rate among recent university graduates. One explanation? Companies may be replacing entry-level white-collar jobs with AI. Alternatively, spending on AI could simply be “crowding” new hire spending.
Merchants say the crisis is truly a “sequence of administrative decisions being made by executives trying to reduce labor costs and integrate control of the organization,” revealing it as “a trend in the companies to simply hire human workers as incomes for freelance artists, writers and illustrators decreases.
“The AI employment crisis is not a skinet-esque robot Jobs Apocalypse. It is firing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the flag of the “AI-First Strategy,” he added.