The reaction to their AI announcement doesn't feel organic at all with oceans and oceans of content creators flooding feeds with samesy half-deprecating bashes of them using AI.
I think for every person who genuinely was put off, even more either didn't care, or were using ChatGPT for language learning and would try it to see what they mean by an AI-first approach.
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And for anyone who thinks they'd never take that kind of bad publicity on purpose: this is the brand that "killed" their beloved mascot a few months ago and similarly managed to saturate multiple channels with creators bashing them for that.
This is straight out of the "stop hiring humans" playbook.
Duolingo was also growing - both in terms of earnings and number of employees. They can afford some looses.
And, typically CEO’s say things like this to try to scare/get leverage on employees.