Grammarly Disables AI Tool Accused of Impersonating Real Writers
I’ve talked about Grammarly in a previous post. You may remember its iffy performance actually catching grammar problems when we tested it and a few other “freemium” online grammar tools.
Had I paid the extra $12 for a subscription, I would have been offered Grammarly’s Expert Review, which promises real-time advice from acclaimed writers like Stephen King. Sounds great, right?
The problem? A lawsuit filed Wednesday claims Grammarly was using the names of these writers without permission and illegally sicced its AI on their publicly available work in order to generate “advice” to subscribers on the writers’ behalf.
On Thursday, Shishir Mehrotra, the CEO of Grammarly’s parent company, posted a lengthy statement on LinkedIn apologizing and noting that the feature had been disabled.
The statement, in part, reads:
“We hear the feedback and recognize we fell short on this. I want to apologize 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.”
Sadly, this is yet another example of how tech companies continue to devalue creative work. As I’ve said before, this only reinforces the idea that creative labor isn’t worth paying for.
Related posts:
We Put Four Online Grammar Checkers to the Test. They Flunked.
Why Writers Should Pay Attention to Anthropic’s AI Controversy
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