GoKawiilToday, I’m talking with Shishir Mehrotra, who is CEO of Superhuman — that’s the company formerly known as Grammarly, which is still its flagship product.
Shishir also used to be the chief product officer at YouTube, and he’s on the board of directors at Spotify. He’s a fascinating guy, and we actually scheduled this interview a month or so ago, thinking we’d talk about AI and what it’s doing to software, platforms, and creativity pretty broadly.
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Then things really took a turn. Back in August of last year, Grammarly shipped a feature called Expert Review, which allowed you to get writing suggestions from AI-cloned “experts,” and reporters at The Verge and other outlets discovered that those experts included us. It included me.
No one had ever asked permission to use our names this way, and a lot of reporters were outraged by this — the talented investigative journalist Julia Angwin was so upset she filed a class action lawsuit about it. Superhuman responded to this by first offering up an email-based opt out and then killing the feature entirely. Shishir apologized, and you’ll hear him apologize again.
Throughout all of this, I kept wondering if Shishir was still going to show up and record Decoder, because my questions about decision-making and AI and platforms suddenly seemed a lot harder than before. To his credit, he did, and he stuck it out. This conversation got tense at times, and it’s clear we disagree about how extractive AI feels for people. But I won’t stretch this out any longer.
Okay: Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Shishir Mehrotra, you’re the CEO of Superhuman. Welcome to Decoder.
Thanks for having me.
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