From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
#duolingo #languagelearning #enshittification #capitalism
This has been going on for decades. CDDB, IMDB, Redhat.
Anything you volunteer for will be monetized and you will get cut off from your own contributions.
Even here on Lemmy people post Twitter images and Reddit reader apps which only helps those platforms retain mindshare even if they aren’t directly profiting with ads.
Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?
Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn’t OCR
Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could’ve filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.
The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you’re human, and one word scanned from Google’s book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha
Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn’t want them having access to it
This has been going on for decades. CDDB, IMDB, Redhat.
Anything you volunteer for will be monetized and you will get cut off from your own contributions.
Even here on Lemmy people post Twitter images and Reddit reader apps which only helps those platforms retain mindshare even if they aren’t directly profiting with ads.
Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?
You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren’t a robot.
Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn’t OCR
Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could’ve filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.
The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you’re human, and one word scanned from Google’s book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha
Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn’t want them having access to it