Grammarly will be disabling the AI tool, with CEO Shishir Mehrotra saying ‘scrutiny improves our products’.
Writing assistant Grammarly is facing a lawsuit over a short-lived paid AI feature that impersonates experts to suggest edits.
Grammarly’s ‘Expert Review’ agent allowed users to generate text revisions as if they were written by subject matter experts. The agent offers “subject-matter expertise and personalised, topic-specific feedback” that meets “rigorous academic or professional standards”, Grammarly said last August.
Numerous well-known figures – dead and alive – are used by Grammarly for the $12-a-month tool, including many journalists from leading publications such as Bloomberg, The New York Times, Wired, Atlantic and The Verge, and famous authors such as Stephen King. The figures were seemingly impersonated without consent.
One such impersonated, Julia Angwin, an investigative journalist with credits at The Wall Street Journal, Pro Publica and The New York Times sued Grammarly yesterday (11 March), alleging that the company violated the privacy and publicity rights of her and many other journalists, authors and editors by “exploiting their names and identities for profit without their consent”.
Angwin said: “I have worked for decades honing my skills as a writer and editor, and I am distressed to discover that a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise.”
In its user guide for the feature, Grammarly said that the agent “identifies relevant subject-matter experts based on your text and suggests edits from the perspective of these experts”.
Meanwhile, Alex Gay, the vice-president of product and corporate marketing at Superhuman, Grammarly’s parent company, told The Verge that these experts are mentioned “because their published works are publicly available and widely cited”.
Following the backlash, Grammarly has decided to withdraw the agent. “Over the past week, we received valid critical feedback from experts who are concerned that the agent misrepresented their voices. This kind of scrutiny improves our products, and we take it seriously,” Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra said in a post on LinkedIn.
“I want to apologise and acknowledge that we’ll rethink our approach going forward.
“After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review while we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented — or not represented at all.” The company said it will allow experts to opt out of the feature via an email.
As Casey Newton, the editor and founder of Platformer noted, standalone writing assistants such as Grammarly are no longer enough in the era of large language models. “Anyone with access to Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini can already get editing that makes Grammarly’s core product look like a relic,” Newton said.
This is why Grammarly diversified with the acquisition of AI productivity tools start-up Coda in 2024. Grammarly acquired Superhuman last July and later rebranded its parent company after the acquired company.
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