Duolingo introduced plans this week to interchange contractors with AI and turn into an “AI-first” firm — a transfer that journalist Brian Merchant pointed to as an indication that the AI jobs disaster “is here, now.”
In reality, Merchant spoke to a former Duolingo contractor who stated this isn’t even a brand new coverage. The firm reduce round 10% of its contractor workforce at the finish of 2023, and Merchant stated there was one other spherical of cuts in October 2024. In each circumstances, contractors (first translators, then writers) had been changed with AI.
Merchant additionally famous reporting in The Atlantic round the unusually excessive unemployment fee for latest school graduates. One rationalization? Companies could be changing entry-level white collar jobs with AI, or their spending on AI would possibly merely be “crowding out” the spending for brand new hires.
This disaster, Merchant wrote, is admittedly “a series of management decisions being made by executives seeking to cut labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations,” and it’s manifesting as “attrition in creative industries, the declining income of freelance artists, writers, and illustrators, and in corporations’ inclination to simply hire fewer human workers.”
“The AI jobs crisis is not any sort of SkyNet-esque robot jobs apocalypse — it’s DOGE firing tens of thousands of federal employees while waving the banner of ‘an AI-first strategy,’” he added.