Grammarly Is Offering ‘Expert’ AI Reviews From Your Favorite Authors—Dead or Alive

Do you have any fond memories of being a teacher’s pet? Do you wish you could still receive grades from your favorite college professor? Do you dream of a voice of relentless authority correcting your every word choice and punctuation mark? Well, great news: A certain software company has developed a way to simulate reviews not only from bestselling authors and famous academics of our time, but also from many who died decades ago – and the company obviously didn’t need anyone’s permission to do it.

Once used only for proofreading correct grammar and spelling, writing tool Grammarly has added a host of generative AI features over the past few years. In October, CEO Shishir Mehrotra announced that the entire company was rebranding as Superhuman to reflect a new suite of AI-based products. However, the AI ​​writing “partner” remains called Grammarly. “When technology works everywhere, it starts to seem ordinary,” Mehrotra wrote in his press release. “And that usually means something extraordinary is happening under the hood.”

The expanded Grammarly platform now offers an AI solution for every need imaginable, and some you’ve probably never had. There’s an AI chatbot that will answer specific questions as you write a draft, a “paraphrase” feature that suggests style changes, a “humanizer” that revises based on a selected voice, an AI grader that predicts your paper’s grade as a college course, and even tools to flag and tweak sentences commonly produced by large language models. (Of course, you’re using the AI ​​to do everything here, but you don’t want it to her like that.)

But perhaps most insidiously, Grammarly now offers an “expert review” option which, instead of producing what looks like a generic review from an anonymous LLM, lists a number of real academics and authors available to provide feedback on your text. Let me be clear: these people have nothing to do with this process. As a disclaimer states: “References to experts in this product are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with or endorsement by Grammarly.” »

As announced on a support page, Grammarly users can seek advice from virtual versions of living writers and scholars such as Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson (neither of whom responded to a request for comment) as well as deceased ones, such as the publisher William Zinsser and the astronomer Carl Sagan. Presumably, these various AI agents are trained on the works of the people they are meant to imitate, although the legality of this content harvesting remains murky at best, and the subject of many, a lot copyright lawsuits.

“Our Expert Review agent reviews writing a user is working on, whether it’s a marketing brief or a student project on biodiversity, and leverages our underlying LLM to surface expert content that can help the paper author shape their work,” says Jen Dakin, senior communications manager at Superhuman. “Suggested experts depend on the substance of the writing being reviewed. The Expert Review Officer does not claim endorsement or direct participation by these experts; it provides suggestions inspired by the work of experts and directs users to influential voices that they can then explore in more depth.”

Someone like King might view advances in AI as unstoppable, and there might be no one left to defend Zinsser’s 1976 textbook. Write well great tech vultures, but what about the countless other luminaries who still want to prevent their material from being compressed into an algorithm? Vanessa Heggie, associate professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of Birmingham, recently shared a particularly dark example of how the feature works on LinkedIn, accusing Superhuman of “creating little LLMs” based on the “discarded work” of the living and the dead, trading on “their names and reputations.” The screenshot she posted showed the availability of analytics from an AI agent modeled on David Abulafia, an English historian of the medieval and Renaissance periods who died in January. “Obscene,” Heggie wrote.