Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

https://www.wired.com/story/grammarly-is-offering-expert-ai-reviews-from-your-favorite-authors-dead-or-alive/

by jmsflknr • 5 months ago

132 200 5 months ago

See also:

Grammarly is using our identities without permission, https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/890921/g..., https://archive.ph/1w1oO

drbig• 5 months ago

The most interesting is the realization that if the LLM's input is only the output of a professional (human), then by definition the LLM cannot mimic the process the (human) professional applied to get from whatever input they had to produce the output.

In other words an LLM can spit out a plausible "output of X", however it cannot encode the process that lead X to transform their inputs into their output.

Eddy_Viscosity2• 5 months ago

Is it not possible for the process of input to output be inferred by the llm and therefore applied to new inputs to create appropriate outputs.

whizzter• 5 months ago

Only if the LLM knows the inputs connected to particular outputs, pre-digital era or classified material might not be available, neither informal discussions with other experts.

Most importantly, negative but unused signals might not be available if the text does not mention it.

weird-eye-issue6• 5 months ago

Replace "LLM" with "student" and read that again. You don't just blindly give students output, you teach them, like what you are supposed to do with an LLM.

shafyy• 5 months ago

Enough with this analgoy. It's flawed on so many levels. First and foremost, stop devaluing humanitiy and hyping up AI companies by parroting their party line. Second, LLMs don't learn. They can hold a very limited amount of context, as you know. And every time you need to start over. So fuck no, "teaching" and LLM is nothing like teaching an actual human.

ErroneousBosh2• 5 months ago

You can't "teach" an LLM. It can't think. It's a simple pattern-matching algorithm, basically just an Eliza bot with a huge table of phrases.

dwb5• 5 months ago

If you change the words in a sentence then it changes its meaning.

simianwords32• 5 months ago

i don't get what the point of what you are saying is? i can ask it to explain how to solve an integral right now with steps.

i can ask it to tell me how to write like a person X right now.

Planktonne5• 5 months ago

"Explain how to solve" and "write like X" are crucially different tasks. One of them is about going through the steps of a process, and the other is about mimicking the result of a process.

mysterydip2• 5 months ago

Is the reason it can show steps for solving an integral because the training set contained webpages or books showing how to do it?

RobRivera5• 5 months ago

Actually this is the crux and the nuance which makes discussing LLM specifics a pain in the general space.

If you built an LLM exclusively on the writings and letters of John Steinbeck, you could NOT tell the LLM to solve an integral for you amd expect it to be right.

Instead what you will receive is a text that follows a statistically derived most likely (in accordance to the perplexity tuning) response to such a question.

blargey• 5 months ago

“i can ask it to give a text description of a linear logical math process that has been described in text countless times”

If you think “the tacit knowledge and conscious/subconscious reasoning mix that caused X to write like X” can be meaningfully captured by some 1-page “style guide” like llmtropes, I’m not sure what to tell you. Such a style description would be informed by a soup of reviewers that most certainly cannot write like X even with their stronger and more nuanced observations than what the LLM picked up.

treetalker2• 5 months ago

You've pinpointed the connection that people fail to make when they seek legal advice (or even information) from LLMs.

JCharante2• 5 months ago

what prevents the input from being keystrokes and screen recordings of thousands of lawyers solving cases?

BrtByte3• 5 months ago

LLMs obviously aren't reproducing the internal cognitive process, but they might still capture some of the structural patterns that emerge from it

noslenwerdna• 5 months ago

Interestingly, there is some neuroscience research that transformer architecture resembles "cue based retrieval" in the human brain in some important ways.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X2...

kome2• 5 months ago

that's so scummy. why they even needs "names"? it's a rhetorical question...

bayindirh4• 5 months ago

Moreover, they don't even apologize:

"The work is public, hence the name. It's well known, it's in the data. Who cares".

What will they do next? Create similar publications with domainsquatting and write all-AI articles with the "public" names?

Is it still fair use, then?

kome2• 5 months ago

yes i hate that. they still have the chutzpah of keeping doing it. and i am sure it's illegal in multiple legislation. because they are not writing articles where you can cite people, they are selling a product.

SoKamil• 5 months ago

Authority washing.

dryadin• 5 months ago

Frankly, I am surprised this was not shut down by their legal counsel (assuming they have one and they actually asked). The legal exposure here is significant. This could be defamation, there are publicity rights issues, copyright, and maybe even criminal liability.

beernet• 5 months ago

This feels like a desperate attempt to stay relevant in a post-LLM world. They’re basically wrapping an LLM in a "professional" skin and calling it an expert review. The problem is that once you start letting an AI "expert" dictate tone and logic, you effectively lobotomize the writer’s original intent. We’re reaching a point where AI is just reviewing other AI-generated text, creating a feedback loop of pure mediocrity. Copium for middle management, if you ask me.

Aerroon• 5 months ago

I disagree. You write when you have something to say. A service like Grammarly tries to help you convey what you want to say, but better. What you want to say is still up to you.

Words paint the picture, but the meaning of the picture is what matters.

ibejoeb2• 5 months ago

That's a tiny fraction. Most people write because they're told to write.

bonoboTP4• 5 months ago

It's great. Now that fancy writing is cheap and infinite, fields whose entire scholarship value was in obscurantist jargon bending have to actually start to turn on their brains and care about making more sense than an LLM can.

jagged-chisel• 5 months ago

… have to actually start to …

Or do they?

contagiousflow2• 5 months ago

What fields rely only on jargon manipulation to produce papers?

4nonverbal-alit• 5 months ago

Grammarly even from the start was very distracting to me even as a someone using english as a second language to communicate. I have developed my own taste and way of articulating thoughts, but grammarly (and LLMs today) forced me to remove that layer of personality from my texts which I didn't wanted to let go. Sure I sounded less professional, but that was the image I wanted to project anyways.

Unrelated but surprising to me that I've found built-in grammar checking within JetBrains IDEs far more useful at catching grammar mistakes while not forcing me to rewrite entire sentences.

astra1701• 5 months ago

JetBrains’s default grammar checking plugin[1] is actually built on languagetool[2], a pretty decent grammar checker that also happens to be partly open source and self-hostable[3]. Sadly, they have lately shoved in a few (thankfully optional) crappy LLM-based features (that don’t even work well in the first place) and coated their landing page in endless AI keywords, but their core engine is still more traditional and open-source, and hasn’t really seemed to change in years. You can just run it on your own device and point their browser and editor extensions to it.

[1] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12175-natural-languages... [2] https://languagetool.org -- warning: is coated in somewhat-misleading AI keywords [3] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool

wongarsu2• 5 months ago

The problem is that once you start letting an AI "expert" dictate tone and logic, you effectively lobotomize the writer’s original intent

Isn't that what grammarly has always been, since long before the invention of the transformer? They give you a long list of suggestions, and unless you write a corporate press release half of them are best ignored. The skill is in choosing which half to ignore

himata4113• 5 months ago

Grammarly seemed pretty dead on arrival the moment they added AI features. They would have said a lot more relevant and kept the costs down if they were strictly no-ai imo.

bayindirh4• 5 months ago

The funny thing is, their core "grammar" engine has to work on a language model + some hard heuristics anyway. So they were on a path to utilize this thing for real good, with concrete benefits.

Generative AI is a plague at this point. Everybody is adding to their wares to see what happens. It's almost like ricing a car. All noise, no go.

Applejinx• 5 months ago

I would be surprised if the living writers can't sue over this.

Imustaskforhelp2• 5 months ago

Man I really don't like this at all.

It really feels so wrong to spare nobody, not even dead writer/people.

All it's gonna do is something similar to em-dashes where people who use it are now getting called LLM when it was their writing which would've trained LLM (the irony)

If this takes off, hypothetically, we will associate slop with the writing qualities similar to how Ghibli art is so good but it felt so sloppy afterwards and made us less appreciate the Ghibli artstyle seeing just about anyone make it.

The sad part is that most/some of these dead writers/artists were never appreciated by the people of their time and they struggled with so many feelings and writing/art was their way of expressing that. Van Gogh is an example which comes to my mind.[0] Many struggled from depression and other feelings too. To take that and expression of it and turn it into yet another product feels quite depressing for a company to do

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Vincent_van_Gogh

bayindirh4• 5 months ago

It really feels so wrong to spare nobody, not even dead writer/people.

That train left at full steam when companies scraped the whole internet and claimed it was fair use. Now it's a slippery slope covered with slime.

I believe there'll be no slowing down from now on.

They are doing something amazing, will they ask for permission? /s.

senaevren• 5 months ago

A few things worth flagging: On GDPR: Using a named individual's identity to generate commercial AI output isn't obviously covered by "legitimate interest." Affected EU-based individuals likely have real grounds to object or request erasure. On IP/publicity rights: You can't copyright an editing style — but you absolutely can have a right of publicity claim when a company profits from your name and simulated judgment without consent. The Lanham Act's false endorsement provisions could also be in play here. The kicker: The "sources" cited by the feature were broken, spammy, or pointed to completely unrelated content. So the defense that suggestions are inspired by someone's actual work may not even hold up technically.

josefritzishere• 5 months ago

This feels illegal. Even if it's not, it further drives the perception that AI is only good for crime, like crypto.

chilipepperhott• 5 months ago

I know all press is good press... but there are limits.

If it feels like Grammarly does not respect your right to digital sovereignty, it is because it does not.

mikeocool• 5 months ago

It almost seems like this whole feature is designed to invite law suits.

Seems pretty likely usage of Grammarly's core product has cratered in the past few years. Not totally hard to imagine one of the big AI labs paying their legal fees in exchange for putting this out there and kick starting the legal process on some of these issues.

SoftTalker• 5 months ago

LLMs basically made Grammarly irrelevant as a product. Why have a tool to correct your grammar when you can just have it write the whole piece for you. And one things LLMs do well is construct grammatically correct text.

So IMO they are just flinging things at the wall trying to find a way back.

BrtByte3• 5 months ago

The real issue seems more about transparency and consent around how the models are trained and how author personas are being used

BrtByte3• 5 months ago

The weird part about tools like this isn't just the copyright question, it's the simulation of authority

ludicrousdispla• 5 months ago

Yeah, this is like applying a stained-glass image filter to your portrait in order to achieve sainthood.

tsunamifury• 5 months ago

I spent a great deal of time trying to do this at allofus.ai with a team of ex-googlers with our goal being to help creators eventually 'own' their personas and drive and compete to use them to help end users.

We believed this was coming and that the best way to handle it was give the real person control over their persona to grow/edit/change and train it as they see fit.

I actually own the patent on building an expert persona based on the context of the prompt plus the real persons learned information manifold...

bigbuppo• 5 months ago

So what you're saying is that you can put a stop to crap like this by slinging a C&D their way?

etchalon• 5 months ago

"We can do it because no one can stop us."

k__• 5 months ago

I offer my expertise in tech writing to review your AI articles and docs.

jacquesm10• 5 months ago

Digital necrophilia. The living ones are the ones that are going to have to make the objections here.

This is revolting at so many levels.

pilooch• 5 months ago

Revolting and so inevitable though I believe: we're sort of running these already in our minds, we'll be outrun here too.!

thesuitonym2• 5 months ago

There is an unimaginably large gulf of distance between an individual thinking about what an author would say about their writing, and a corporate entity selling the "opinion" of an LLM asked to act like someone.

PessimalDecimal• 5 months ago

You probably mean necromancy.

jacquesm10• 5 months ago

You probably mean necromancy.

I probably did not. Then I would have written that. They are fucking over the dead. They are clearly not communicating with the dead.

beepbopboopp• 5 months ago

Please share how this revolting to you

jacquesm10• 5 months ago

Something in the same spirit as this:

https://www.chiffandfipple.com/t/kenny-g-as-necrophile-long-...

You don't bring the dead virtually back to life to perform tricks for you.

euroderf• 5 months ago

In a similar vein, I'll bet you that rather soon Faceborg will announce a service to keep the deceased "alive" on the platform, posting and commenting away. For plenty of accounts there's plenty of training material.

jacquesm10• 5 months ago

Oh shit, that never even crossed my mind. They don't even need the content creators any more, they can just keep everybody on the platform even though they have left. Faking likes and faking posts for eternity.

sensanaty• 5 months ago

They already have a feature where a profile can be marked as a memorial page or some such thing, I don't think this is so far fetched considering how ghoulish that robot Zucc is.

Rebelgecko• 5 months ago

Funnily enough FB already has the patent for this: using LLMs for "simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example... if the user is deceased."

jsheard• 5 months ago

That's almost exactly the premise of a Black Mirror episode (S2E1 - Be Right Back) so you know it's going to get Torment Nexus'ed into existence.

Ferret7446• 4 months ago

What objection? IANAL but offering something "inspired by" is fair use. We have not yet reached a point where you can get a government sanctioned monopoly for your writing style or personality.

Unless they're outright marketing this as "endorsed by" or similar, there is no case.

zamadatix• 5 months ago

For the main link to the wired article as well: https://archive.is/2Qbdu

randusername• 5 months ago

When asked if Superhuman considered notifying the people named in its AI feature, or requesting their permission, Gay said, “The experts in Expert Review appear because their published works are publicly available and widely cited.”

Big difference between "AI, rewrite this passage to sound more like Hunter S Thompson" and "Grammarly-brand unauthorized digital agent Hunter S Thompson, provide a critique of my writing"

Let's see what company values informed this decision [0].

At Grammarly, it all starts with our EAGER values: Ethical, Adaptable, Gritty, Empathetic, and Remarkable. These values are guiding lights that keep the Grammarly experience compassionate and our business competitive.

[0] https://www.grammarly.com/about

dolebirchwood2• 5 months ago

it all starts with our EAGER values

Sounds like something I'd expect to see on a banner in an elementary school classroom.

Matl• 5 months ago

Many CEOs treat their employees like kids in elementary school to make themselves feel smarter.

kleene_op• 5 months ago

EAGER is not enough. EAGER only guarantees one side of the conjoined triangles of success. They teach this at business school.

Alan_Writer• 5 months ago

Why Grammarly has to come to this point even knowing that this is not only "controversial" somehow, but rare?

Does it add any value for writers?

fritzo• 5 months ago

This is great!

One lesson they might draw from the negative press is to offer a more open-ended interface, like ChatGPT, where for years people have already been asking "Pretend you are X and review my writing". This interface design pattern gives the press nowhere to point their angry fingers

cynicalsecurity• 5 months ago

Is anyone still using Grammarly? Their app has been replaced with a single AI query.

zac23or• 5 months ago

I had a very bad experience with Datadog. They seem to be big scammers.

For me, Grammarly gives me the same impression as Datadog, but I have no explanation for why I feel that way.

Cameri• 4 months ago

The writer of the article confesses to using LLMs to improve their grammar. Writer is then upset Grammarly correctly attributes the recommendation he is getting to someone they know. A nothing burger essentially.

Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

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