Grammarly Is Offering 'Expert' AI Reviews From Your Favorite Authors--Dead or Alive

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

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https://archive.li/Q1rmB

DO YOU HAVE fond memories of being a teacher’s pet? Wish you could still get notes from your favorite college professor? Dream about some implacable voice of authority correcting your every word choice and punctuation mark? Well, great news: A certain software company has engineered a way to simulate criticism not just from bestselling authors and famous academics of our time, but also many who died decades ago—and the company evidently didn’t need permission from anybody to do it.

Once relied upon only to proofread for correct grammar and spelling, the writing tool Grammarly has added a host of generative AI features over the past several years. In October, CEO Shishir Mehrotra announced that the overall company was rebranding as Superhuman to reflect a new suite of AI-powered products. However, the AI writing “partner” remains called Grammarly. “When technology works everywhere, it starts to feel ordinary,” Mehrotra wrote in his press release. “And that usually means something extraordinary is happening under the hood.”

The expanded Grammarly platform now offers an AI solution for every imaginable need—and some you’ve probably never had. There’s an AI chatbot that will answer specific questions as you compose a draft, a “paraphraser” feature that suggests changes in style, a “humanizer” that revises according to a selected voice, an AI grader that predicts how your document would score as college coursework, and even tools for flagging and tweaking phrases commonly produced by large language models. (Sure, you’re using AI to do everything here, but you don’t want it to sound like that.)

Perhaps most insidiously, however, Grammarly now has an “expert review” option that, instead of producing what looks like a generic critique from a nameless LLM, lists a number of real academics and authors available to weigh in on your text. To be clear: Those people have nothing to do with this process. As a disclaimer clarifies: “References to experts in this product are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.”

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