Duolingo’s CEO said AI still can’t match the work of his company’s artists and designers.
On Tuesday’s episode of the “Rapid Response” podcast, CEO Luis von Ahn said that his team is trying to use AI as much as possible, but “we really don’t want to decrease quality.”
“For some things, AI is quite ready to do high-quality work. For some things, it’s just not,” he said. “We’re not going to decrease quality just for the sake of using AI.”
When podcast host Bob Safian asked where AI still falls short, von Ahn pointed to design.
“For example, we hire a lot of artists and designers, and our app is very high-craft when it comes to design,” he said. “We’re just not seeing AI get to the level of creativity or the level of polish that our top people have, by any means.”
Duolingo has publicly embraced AI.
Last April, the company said it would evaluate employee performance partly based on AI usage. The company later walked that back, with von Ahn saying that this rule prompted employees to use AI in areas where it was unnecessary.
“I don’t think that was right,” he said on the Rapid Response episode about the evaluation criteria. He said that while most employees benefit from using AI, there were projects or roles where it might not help.
“So, making a blanket statement that we were going to evaluate employees on their usage of AI was not needed,” he added. “We’ve removed that.”
AI tools have spread across creative industries, with companies increasingly using them for everything from marketing assets to product design.
Some companies, like Kate Spade and Coach parent Tapestry, have said that AI is already part of their designers’ workflows.
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