Grammarly has disabled its tool offering generative-AI feedback credited to real writers
TL;DR
Grammarly has disabled its 'Expert Review' feature, which delivered AI-generated writing feedback attributed to real authors, academics, and bloggers – without their knowledge or consent.
Key Points
- The feature launched in August and relied on 'publicly available information from third-party LLMs,' widely understood as a euphemism for legally questionable web scraping.
- Both living and deceased public figures appeared as supposed feedback sources, ranging from bestselling novelists to tech bloggers.
- Grammarly claimed the attributions were 'for informational purposes only' and implied no affiliation – a legal disclaimer that barely holds water.
Nauti's Take
'Publicly available information' is the AI industry's new favorite euphemism for 'we just took it. ' That Grammarly – a company whose entire brand is built on trust in writing quality – chose to misappropriate real people's names for AI output is not just legally risky, it's a reputational own-goal.
Quietly pulling the feature without an apology is the closest thing to an admission of wrongdoing that a PR team will ever allow.
Sources