Grammarly and the Illusion of Editing by Renowned Experts

An Unexpected Discovery

A journalist was surprised to learn last Friday that he had become an editor for Grammarly. This subscription-based writing assistant recently introduced a feature called "expert review." According to Grammarly, this feature is designed to elevate writing to the next level through insights from professionals, authors, and subject matter experts.

However, upon closer examination, it turns out that these "insights" do not actually come from leading professionals, nor even from humans. In reality, they are generated by artificial intelligence, and the names of the experts associated with them do not necessarily reflect their opinions. A warning on Grammarly's support page specifies that references to experts are for informational purposes only and do not imply any affiliation or endorsement from them.

Prestigious Names Without Consent

The "expert review" feature drew attention thanks to an article from The Verge, which reports that this feature was launched last August. Among the "experts" mentioned are famous authors like Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan. The name of the journalist who investigated is also included, along with those of many other tech journalists, including former editors of The Verge like Casey Newton and Joanna Stern, as well as other journalists from Wired, Bloomberg, and The New York Times.

Some expert descriptions contain inaccuracies, such as outdated job titles. These errors could have been corrected if Grammarly had asked these individuals for permission to reference their work. No one asked his permission to use his name in this way, let alone to compensate him for the expert work that his AI clone was apparently doing in his name. An annual subscription to Grammarly costs $144.

Thoughts on the Impact of AI

This journalist has long assumed that one day, AI could take his job. He simply thought someone would warn him when that happened. This situation with Grammarly annoyed him, as it reflects the same web-destroying sense of entitlement that defines the modern AI industry. At the same time, he felt a morbid curiosity about the quality of these expert reviews, and of Grammarly in general.

He regularly asks chatbots for corrections and notes that their suggestions have significantly improved over the past year. But it would never occur to him to pay for a separate subscription just for a writing assistant, especially knowing that Grammarly is simply reselling tokens from OpenAI and other LLM providers at a markup.

Testing the Feature

Not everyone is ready to copy and paste their Google Doc into a ChatGPT window and ask for a correction. Grammarly claims to have 40 million daily users, and it was time to see what they were getting. So he signed up for a free trial of the company's paid product and got to work.

He used a draft of an article by his colleague Ella Markianos about a protest at OpenAI to test the feature. He clicked on the "expert review" button, one of the twelve tools that Grammarly offers in its paid product, which could generously be described as a ChatGPT prompt turned into a button. In his own edit of Ella's article, he followed the system passed down through thousands of corrections received over the years from his fellow journalists.

They went back and forth several times, iterating gradually until both were satisfied with the result. The "expert review" in Grammarly does not work this way. After clicking the button, a box opened to explain what was happening. A series of expert names appeared, each seeming less likely to have ever agreed to this than the last.

There was Shoshana Zuboff, the author who popularized the term "surveillance capitalism," and who has spoken out against the extractive nature of Big Tech. There was Claire Wardle, a misinformation researcher whose work examines how to make communities more resilient to propaganda and hoaxes. And there, floating near the top of the draft, was John Carreyrou, the investigative journalist and bestselling author who exposed Theranos.