Grammarly released a controversial feature last week that uses AI to simulate editorial feedback, making it seem like you’re getting a critique from novelist Stephen King, the late scientist Carl Sagan, or tech journalist Kara Swisher. But Grammarly did not get permission from the hundreds of experts it included in this feature, called “Expert Review,” to use their names.
One of the affected writers, journalist Julia Angwin, has filed a class action lawsuit against Superhuman, the parent company that owns Grammarly, arguing that the company violated the privacy and publicity rights of her and the other writers it impersonated. A class action lawsuit allows writers to join Angwin in her case.
“I have worked for decades honing my skills as a writer and editor, and I am distressed to discover that a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise,” Angwin said in a statement.
The situation is more than a little ironic — Angwin has spent her career leading investigations into tech companies’ impacts on privacy. Other critics of this kind of technology, like renowned AI ethicist Timnit Gebru, were also included in Grammarly’s “Expert Review.”
The “Expert Review” feature, available only to subscribers paying $144 a year, predictably fails to deliver on the promise of thoughtful feedback.
Casey Newton, the founder and editor of the tech newsletter Platformer and another person impersonated by Grammarly, fed one of his articles into the tool and got feedback from Grammarly’s approximation of tech journalist Kara Swisher. Grammarly’s imitation of Swisher produced “feedback” so generic that it raises the question of why the company would go through the rigmarole of using these writers’ likenesses in the first place.
Here is what Grammarly’s approximation of Kara Swisher told him: “Could you briefly compare how daily AI users versus AI skeptics articulate risk, creating a through-line readers can follow?”
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