Grammarly will be disabling the AI tool, he said ‘testing is progressing [its] products’.
Writing assistant Grammarly is facing a lawsuit over a paid AI feature that pretends to be experts to suggest editing.
Grammarly’s ‘expert review’ agent allows users to generate text reviews as if they were written by subject matter experts. The agent provides “topical expertise and personalized, topic-specific feedback” that meets “rigorous academic or professional standards”, Grammarly said last August.
Many well-known figures – dead and alive – use Grammarly for $12 a month, including many journalists from leading publications such as Bloomberg, the New York Times, Wired, the Atlantic and the Verge, and famous authors such as Stephen King. The statistics seemed to be matched without permission.
One of those characters, Julia Angwin, an investigative reporter with credits in the Wall Street Journal, Pro Publica and the New York Times sued Grammarly on Wednesday (March 11), complaining that the company violated her privacy and civil rights along with many other reporters, writers, and editors by “exploiting their names and identities for profit” without their consent.
Angwin said: “I’ve worked for decades honing my skills as a writer and editor, and it bothers me to find out that a tech company is selling a fake version of my hard-earned work.”
In its user guide for the feature, Grammarly said the agent “identifies relevant subject matter experts based on your text and suggests editing from the perspective of these experts.”
Meanwhile, Alex Gay, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Superhuman, Grammarly’s parent company, told The Verge that these experts are being talked about “because their published work is publicly available and widely cited.”
Following the backlash, Grammarly decided to withdraw the agent. “Over the past week, we’ve received a fair amount of critical feedback from professionals who are concerned that an agent has misrepresented their words. This type of scrutiny improves our products, and we take it seriously,” said Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra in a post on LinkedIn.
“I want to apologize and acknowledge that we will rethink our approach going forward.” The company said it will allow technicians to opt out of the feature via email.
As Casey Newton, editor and co-founder of Platformer has noted, independent writing assistants like Grammarly are no longer adequate in the age of large language models. “Anyone with access to Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini can already edit that makes Grammarly’s core product look like crap,” says Newton.
That’s why Grammarly diversified with the acquisition of AI productivity tools starting Coda in 2024. Grammarly acquired Superhuman last July and later renamed itself after the acquired company.
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