Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI ‘Expert Review’ Feature
Superhuman, technology The company behind writing software Grammarly is facing a class-action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics, none of whom consented to their names appearing in the product.
Julia Angwin, an award-winning investigative journalist who founded The Markup, a nonprofit news organization that covers the impact of technology on society, is the only named plaintiff in the suit, which does not seek a specific amount of damages but claims that damages for all of the plaintiffs exceed $5 million. She was one of many, alongside Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson, offered through Grammarly’s “Expert Review” tool as a sort of virtual editor for users.
The federal lawsuit, filed Wednesday afternoon in the Southern District of New York, states that Angwin, on behalf of himself and others similarly situated, “challenges Grammarly’s misappropriation of the names and identities of hundreds of journalists, authors, writers and editors to gain profits for Grammarly and its owner, Superhuman.”
The complaint comes as Superhuman has already decided to discontinue the feature amid significant public backlash. “After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review as we reinvent the feature to make it more useful to users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented – or not represented at all,” Ailian Gan, Superhuman’s director of product management, said in a statement to WIRED shortly before the complaint was filed. “We designed the agent to help users harness the ideas of thought leaders and experts and to give experts new ways to share their knowledge and reach new audiences. Based on the feedback we received, we clearly missed the mark. We’re sorry and will do things differently in the future.”
As WIRED reported earlier this month, Superhuman added a suite of AI-powered widgets to the platform last year, including one that purported to engage a veteran writer (living or dead) with a critique of the user’s writing. While a disclaimer clarified that none of the people cited endorsed or directly participated in the development of this tool, which leveraged a large underlying language model, various authors, including WIRED journalists, expressed frustration that Grammarly invoked their likenesses and seemingly regurgitated their life’s work with these AI agents.
Angwin’s lawyer, Peter Romer-Friedman, says long-standing laws in New York and California, where Superhuman is based, clearly prohibit the commercial use of a person’s name and likeness without their permission. “Legally, we think it’s a pretty simple matter,” he told WIRED. “More broadly, one of the reasons we’re filing this lawsuit is, you know, so we can see what’s happening in our society: that many professionals who spend years, or in Julia’s case, decades, perfecting a skill or craft, then find their name or skills appropriated by others without their consent.”
As an opinion editor for The New York Times, Angwin has written extensively about how Silicon Valley giants have eroded privacy in the 21st century.
“Contrary to the apparent belief of some technology companies, it is illegal to appropriate people’s names and identities for commercial purposes, whether those people are famous or not,” the lawsuit states. “By this action, Ms. Angwin seeks to stop Grammarly and its owner, Superhuman, from trading on her name and those of hundreds of other journalists, authors, publishers and even lawyers, and to stop Grammarly from attributing to them words they never said and advice they never gave. »
Angwin tells WIRED that when she learned of Grammarly’s use of her name and reputation through the tech newsletter Platformer, she was surprised that she had been cloned, so to speak. “You know, I always think deepfakes are something that celebrities get caught up in, not regular journalists,” she says. “I was just like, are you kidding me?”
