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

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Most people probably know Grammarly for its browser extension that suggests how to organize your emails, but over the past few years, it’s had even bigger ambitions. In October, the company formerly known as Grammarly made a public pivot to rebrand itself as an artificial intelligence company called Superhuman. The new name was adopted from Superhuman Mail, an AI-powered email platform that Grammarly acquired in June 2025.

CPO Superhuman Noam Lovinsky vowed that “the Grammarly brand is not going anywhere.” Grammarly will continue to be part of Superhuman, but the writing aids sidebar will increasingly become a hub for AI agents, rather than just grammar and spelling suggestions.

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

When a Grammarly user selects the “Expert Review” button, the feature will generate suggestions “inspired by” relevant experts, under their names next to a check mark icon. (What this verified-style code was supposed to mean 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 Expert Review side panel contains a subtle disclaimer that states that references to experts in the feature “do not imply any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement of these individuals or entities.”

This feature remained largely unnoticed for several months, remaining under the radar until March 4th, when Wired She reported that she had been observed using the names of deceased professors to provide written comments.

In early March, two of us were in Edge Expert review has been attempted. All it takes is feeding the feature some drafts edge Articles before we start seeing our colleagues’ names emblazoned on Grammarly’s AI-generated suggestions. Nilay Patel, David Pearce, Tom Warne and Sean Hollister were spotted immediately.

None of them gave Grammarly permission to use their similarities in its feature. Moreover, the suggestions under their names were quite vague, if not annoying – for example, the Nilay Patel-inspired key piece of advice called for “urgency” and “intrigue” by suggesting a general word authority.

when Edge When asked if Superhuman was considering notifying the real people who “inspire” these Expert Reviews, Alex Gay, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Superhuman, deflected, saying instead: “Experts appear in Expert Review because their published work is publicly available and widely cited.” However, Grammarly itself seems to have trouble citing its sources because in our testing, “Source” links in expert review suggestions were often broken or redirected to completely unrelated articles.

On March 10th, a few days later Edge We reported finding our employees’ names in Expert Review, and Grammarly responded by launching an email box where experts can opt out of the feature. At the time, there was no indication that Superhuman was planning to disable the feature entirely or give the experts who were using their names any amount of control other than sending an email requesting that their images not be used.

But the next day, Grammarly decided to change its stance and announced that it would be disabling expert review, after all. Ailian Gan, Director of Product Management at Superhuman, commented on the change in a statement to Edge“After careful consideration, we’ve decided to disable expert review as 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,” he said.

Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra also responded in a LinkedIn post, saying, “We have received valid critical feedback from experts who are concerned that the customer has misrepresented their voices.” “We heard the feedback and realize we fell short of that,” Mehrotra continued. “I would like to apologize and acknowledge that we will rethink our approach moving forward.” Despite the apology, angry LinkedIn users continued to pile on Mehrotra’s post.

After the expert review was gone, Mehrotra emerged Decryptionwhere EdgeNilay 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 was very little used.”) He also claimed that Grammarly was actually just reference Nilay in attributing his work.

“There’s a very fine line between taking a publicly available work and being able to go back and copy it,” Mehrotra said, adding: “And if you draw a line that attributing something is like using its name and likeness, it’s a very difficult one to draw.”

“This was not attribution,” Nilay replied. “I just made something up and put my name on it. There’s no attribution here. This is not something I’ve ever said before. It’s not something I would ever say. I’m not even sure how I came to the idea that based on my work, I would ever say something like that.”

Grammarly had “source” links, but, as mentioned previously, these links were often broken or pointed to content that did not include any mention of editing practices or tips. Grammarly can allow its users to create as many writing tips as they want using AI; The problem here was the use of names edge staff and countless writers, journalists and academics to give those suggestions an appearance of authority they didn’t really have.

On the same day that Superhuman announced it would shut down Expert Review, investigative journalist Julia Angwin filed a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman. The lawsuit alleged that Superhuman violated its own privacy and publicity rights, as well as the rights of other people mentioned in the Expert Review feature, and violated New York and California’s likeness protection laws.

Meanwhile, expert review appears to have disappeared for the time being. This feature is no longer available in Grammarly, although it appears that it may not be permanently offline. Mehrotra’s apology post on LinkedIn seemed to indicate that Superhuman hopes to “reimagine the feature” and perhaps relaunch it one day: “For experts, this is an opportunity to build the same inclusive bond with users, just as Grammarly did. But in this world, experts choose to participate, shape how their knowledge is represented, and control their business model. This is a future that interests me, and I hope to build it with experts who want to develop it alongside us.”

While he was doing it Decryption In 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 editing their writing. It’s clear that AI will have some impact on creators, but it seems that following the expert review model probably won’t go over well with audiences.

More than anything else, Grammarly’s expert review feature serves as a clear example of how people feel about generative AI right now. Superhuman took the work of countless subject matter experts, then used it to generate writing suggestions using AI, put those experts’ names on those suggestions, offered the feature to paying subscribers, and never got approval from the people whose names were the main draw for the feature, let alone compensated those people. It is a clear example of the extractive nature of AI.