Grammarly shuts down ‘Expert Review’ after pushback from the real experts – News

After lighting the ire of journalists, academics, and authors this week, Superhuman Platform Inc. this week pulled a feature from Grammarly that impersonated writers.

The “Expert Review” let users of Grammarly improve their writing by selecting from a roster of “leading professionals, authors, and subject-matter experts,” whose artificial-intelligence-generated advice imitated the style and judgment of real writers – both living and dead.

The reaction was swift. Tech journalist Casey Newton, former senior editor at The Verge, penned the blog post, “Grammarly turned me into an AI editor against my will and I hate it.” Newton said he wasn’t asked to appear as one of the experts.

“I’ve long assumed that before too long, AI might take my job,” Newton wrote. “I just assumed that someone would tell me when it happened.”

Grammarly did at least inform its users – albeit not very accessibly: “References to experts in Expert Review are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.”

Nonetheless, the living authors conceived the feature to be a cheap trick. Some of the names associated with Expert Review included Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, as well as a slew of journalists, including Kara Swisher, The Verge’s Monica Chin, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill and The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany.

Julia Angwin, an investigative journalist formerly of the Wall Street Journal, took the next step and launched a lawsuit. “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,” she said.

Unsurprisingly, Superhuman disabled the feature soon after, and Chief Executive Shishir Mehrotra acknowledged that the experts may have felt the “agent misrepresented their voices.” He added, “I want to apologize and acknowledge that we’ll rethink our approach going forward.”

San Francisco-based Grammarly may have hit hard times since the rise of chatbots. The company has an estimated 40 million users across more than 500,000 organizations, but with ChatGPT and Claude correcting people’s work, the company has had to redefine itself. In 2024, it acquired AI productivity platform Coda Project Inc., bringing Coda’s then-CEO Mehrotra in as Grammarly’s new head.

What Grammarly was doing with its “experts” was no different from what ChatGPT users can do when they ask the chatbot to edit or write in the style of a writer of their choosing. But as Newton said, “Grammarly just had the bad manners to put my name on it.”

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