Print 📰 → Radio 📻 → TV 📺 → Internet 🛜 → Social Media 🖥️ → Generative AI 🤖.

I’ve read somewhere that when new technology appears, people often carry over methods and practices from an older medium to a new one, only to eventually realize that the new medium requires different approaches.

This happened e.g. when we transitioned from radio to TV. Shows were often adapted directly from radio, maintaining the same script-driven approach. It wasn’t until later that we realized the new medium was capable of much more.

Recently, dozens of startups rushed to build language learning speaking companions, most of which are based on a thin layer of ChatGPT.

I must admit that initially, this was one of the most technologically impressive experiences I’ve had in my life. But even as an avid language enthusiast, the excitement of talking to AI fades quickly.

Naively, I thought we might need less latency, smarter responses, and personalized avatars to solve this problem, but now I think differently. I believe the reason why those apps fall short in the long run is because they don’t create meaningful interactions.

Talking to AI is not meaningful because it doesn’t create consequences. Consequences bring meaning. Without meaning, it’s hard to keep practicing for a year or two to truly learn a language.

And no amount of 3D avatars, pretty graphics, voice overs, etc, will change that (see Metaverse)—though I’m sure it will open up wallets from customers and investors, at least initially.

Going initially after speaking is the obvious thing to do, but what if the new wave surreptitiously makes other media much better at learning? The media that is already meaningful to you.

What if with the new wave we would thought of language learning as a filter for the meaningful content you’d normally consume in a day (videos, articles, podcasts), but adapted to your linguistic level so you could keep progressing month after month?

This wouldn’t be so different from learning your first language when your parents simplified the language to talk about what was meaningful to you at the time: toys and games.