The rise and fall of Grammarly’s ‘Expert Review’ AI feature

It is Hindsighta weekly newsletter featuring an essential story from the world of technology. To learn more about the ups and downs of AI, follow Stevie Bonifield. Hindsight arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8 a.m. ET. Register for Hindsight here.

Most people probably know Grammarly for its browser extension that suggests how to spruce up your emails, but in recent years the company has had bigger ambitions. In October, the company formerly known as Grammarly made a public name change to become an AI company called Superhuman. The new name was adopted by Superhuman Mail, an AI email platform acquired by Grammarly in June 2025.

Superhuman CPO Noam Lovinsky vowed that “the Grammarly brand isn’t going anywhere.” Grammarly would continue as part of Superhuman, but the writing help sidebar would increasingly become a hub for AI agents, rather than just grammar and spelling suggestions.

One of the most controversial elements of the rebranding came a few months before this big announcement. In August 2025, Grammarly quietly launched a feature called “Expert Review,” which, according to a now-deleted help page, offered users “insights from leading professionals, authors, and subject matter experts.”

When a Grammarly user selected the Expert Review button, the feature generated suggestions “inspired by” relevant experts, under their names next to a checkmark icon. (The meaning of this verified style icon remains a mystery.) Screenshots on the feature’s help page showed it using the names of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among other famous writers and academics.

The side panel for expert review contained a subtle disclaimer that references to experts in the feature “do not indicate any affiliation with or endorsement by such individuals or entities.”

The feature went largely unnoticed for several months, going unnoticed until March 4, when Wired reported that he had been spotted using the names of deceased professors to give written comments.

At the beginning of March, a few of us The edge tried Expert Review. All it took was populating the feature with a few drafts of Edge articles before we started seeing our own colleagues’ names listed on Grammarly’s AI-generated suggestions. Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Tom Warren and Sean Hollister were spotted instantly.

None of them gave Grammarly permission to use their likenesses in its reporting. On top of that, the suggestions under their names were quite obtuse, even boring – for example, a title inspired by “Nilay Patel” called for “urgency” and “plot” by suggesting the generic word salad.

When The edge When asked if Superhuman thought about telling real, “inspiring” people about these expert reviews, Alex Gay, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Superhuman, deflected, saying instead: “Expert Review experts appear because their published work is publicly available and widely cited.” However, Grammarly itself seemed to have trouble citing its sources since in our testing, “source” links on Expert Review suggestions were often broken or redirected to completely unrelated articles.

March 10, a few days later The edge reported finding our staff members’ names in Expert Review, Grammarly responded by launching an email inbox where experts could unsubscribe from the feature. At the time, there was no indication that Superhuman planned to disable the feature entirely or give the experts whose names they used any modicum of control beyond sending an email to request that their image not be used.

But the next day, Grammarly pivoted and announced that it would disable expert review after all. Ailian Gan, director of product management at Superhuman, commented on the change in a statement to The edgestating: “After careful consideration, we have decided to disable expert rating as we reinvent the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they wish to be represented – or not represented at all. »

Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra also responded in a LinkedIn post, saying, “We have received valid critical feedback from experts who are concerned that the agent may have misrepresented their voices.” Mehrotra added: “We hear the feedback and recognize that we fell short on this. I want to apologize and acknowledge that we will rethink our approach going forward.” Despite the apology, furious LinkedIn users continued to flock to Mehrotra’s post.

After the demise of Expert Review, Mehrotra appeared on DecoderOr The edge‘s Nilay Patel confronted him about Grammarly using his name without permission. Mehrotra repeatedly stated that expert review was a “bad feature,” as well as a “buried” feature. (“It had very little use.”) He also claimed that Grammarly was really just SEO Nilay in the attributions to his work.

“There’s a very thin line between taking a publicly available work and being able to refer to it, and copying it,” Mehrotra said, adding: “And if you draw a line that attributing something is the same as using one’s name and likeness, then that’s a very difficult line to draw.”

“It wasn’t attribution,” Nilay responded. “You just made something up and put my name on it. There’s no attribution here. It’s not something I’ve ever said. It’s not something I would ever say. I don’t even know how you could come up with the idea that, based on my work, I would say something like that.”

Grammarly had “source” links but, as mentioned earlier, these links were often broken or linked to content that contained no mention of editing practices or advice. Grammarly can allow its users to generate as many AI writing tips as they want; the problem here was using the names of Edge staffers and countless other writers, journalists, and academics to give these suggestions a veneer of authority they didn’t really have.

On the same day that Superhuman announced the closure of Expert Review, investigative journalist Julia Angwin filed a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman. The lawsuit alleged that Superhuman violated the privacy and publicity rights of her and others named in the expert review article and violated likeness protection laws in New York and California.

Meanwhile, the Expert Review appears to have disappeared for the time being. The feature is no longer available in Grammarly, although it appears that it is not permanently offline. Mehrotra’s apology post on LinkedIn seems to suggest that Superhuman hopes to “reinvent the feature” and potentially relaunch it one day: “For experts, it’s an opportunity to build the same ubiquitous connection with users, much like Grammarly. But in this world, experts choose to participate, shape how their knowledge is represented, and control their business model. This future excites me, and I hope to build it with experts who want to grow it alongside us.”

During his Decoder During the interview, Mehrotra also suggested that the future of the creator economy could be something like Expert Review, where creators (or experts) train AI agents to represent them and interact with audiences on their behalf, such as by editing their writing. It’s clear that AI will have some impact on creators, but it seems that following the expert review model likely won’t appeal to audiences.

But more than anything, Grammarly’s Expert Review feature serves as an example of what people currently think about generative AI. Superhuman ingested the work of countless subject matter experts, then used it to generate writing suggestions with AI, put the names of those experts on those suggestions, offered the feature to paying subscribers, and failed to obtain consent from the people whose names were the main attraction of the feature, let alone compensate those people. This is a clear example of the extractive nature of AI.