Grammarly offers “expert” AI reviews from your favorite authors – dead or alive

Do you have Fond memories of being a teacher’s pet? Do you wish you could still get feedback from your favorite college professor? Do you dream of a relentless voice of authority correcting every word you choose and punctuation mark? Well, great news: a certain software company designed a way to simulate criticism not only from best-selling authors and famous academics of our time, but also from many who died decades ago — and the company apparently didn’t need anyone’s permission to do so.

Once relied upon solely for proper grammar and spell checking, Grammarly has added a host of generative AI features over the past several years. In October, CEO Shishir Mehrotra announced that the overall company would rebrand as Superhuman to reflect a new range of AI-powered products. However, the AI ​​writing “partner” remains called Grammarly. “When technology works everywhere, it becomes normal,” Mehrotra wrote in his press release. “This usually means something unusual is going on under the hood.”

Grammarly’s expanded platform now provides an AI-powered solution for every need imaginable, some of which you may not have had before. There’s an AI chatbot that answers specific questions while you’re composing a draft, a “paraphrasing” feature that suggests style changes, “humanizing” revision based on a specific voice, an AI classifier that predicts how your document will fare in college coursework, and even tools for tagging and editing phrases typically produced by large language models. (Sure, you’re using AI to do everything here, but you don’t want to voice Like that.)

Perhaps most insidiously, Grammarly now has an “Expert Review” option, which, instead of producing what looks like a generic critique from an anonymous LLM, lists a number of real academics and authors available to evaluate your text. To be clear: these people have nothing to do with this process. As the disclaimer states: “References to experts in this product are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement of these individuals or entities.”

As announced on the support page, Grammarly users can seek advice from virtual versions of living writers and scientists like Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson (neither of whom responded to a request for comment) as well as deceased ones, like editor William Zinsser and astronomer Carl Sagan. The various AI agents are supposedly trained on the actions of the people they are supposed to mimic, although the legality of this content harvesting remains ambiguous at best, and the subject of many, a lot Copyright claims.

“Our expert review agent examines the writing a user is working on, whether it’s a marketing brief or a student project on biodiversity, and leverages our LLM to surface expert content that can help the document author shape their work,” says Jane Dakin, senior communications manager at Superhuman. “Suggested experts are based on the substance of the writing being evaluated. The Expert Review Agent does not claim endorsement or direct involvement from these experts; it makes suggestions inspired by the work of experts and points users toward influential voices who can then explore their knowledge more deeply.”

Someone like King might see the progress of AI as unstoppable, and there might be no one left to defend Zinsser’s 1976 pamphlet. To write well Of the big tech vultures, but what about the countless superstars 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 took to LinkedIn to share a particularly grim example of how this feature works, accusing Superhuman of “creating mini-MAs” based on the “vulgar work” of the living and dead alike, trading on their “names and reputations.” The screenshot she posted showed the availability of analysis from an AI agent modeled after David Aboulafia, an English medieval and Renaissance historian who died in January. “Obscene,” Hughie wrote.