Grammarly Doing Some Creepy AI Stuff
Excuse me, what?
As advertised on a support page, Grammarly users can solicit tips from virtual versions of living writers and scholars such as Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson (neither of whom responded to a request for comment) as well as the deceased, like the editor William Zinsser and astronomer Carl Sagan. Presumably, these different AI agents are trained on the oeuvres of the people they are meant to imitate, though the legality of this content-harvesting remains murky at best, and the subject of many, many copyright lawsuits.
This is a great example of how to offend your customers and famous writers at the same time.
It’s also a great example of where AI will go without regulation, which I know tech companies and Republicans are pushing for. No one gave them permission to create an AI character based on themselves. They just fed some of that person’s writing into the LLM and let it do its thing. There was, apparently, no thought given to whether having a Stephen King-based analyzer would violate the use of his name or if building the LLM would violate his copyright.
That’s not how things work in Big Tech – move fast and break things, right? It’s all fun and games until you’re the one left dealing with the broken bits, including having your name used to market a tool you had nothing to do with.
But maybe the worst thing this is an example of is a feature no one asked for. Did anyone who uses Grammarly approach them and say that this was the feature they most wanted from their tool? For the record, I use Grammarly to help me write this blog because grammar isn’t my strong suit. I have never wanted it to make me sound more like someone else. I wouldn’t have much respect for any writer who did want to use AI to sound like someone famous.
Like too many AI tools, this was a solution in search of a problem. A tool built because they could build it, not because there was customer demand for it.
Update – for more, you can read this from Casey Newton- https://www.platformer.news/grammarly-expert-review-reviewed/
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