Grammarly shuts down controversial 'Expert Review' AI feature, faces pushback from real experts

Grammarly

• Grammarly's 'Expert Review' feature faced criticism and lawsuit
• Journalists claim tool used their identities without permission
• Superhuman has disabled 'Expert Review' after negative response

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Superhuman Platform Inc’s popular writing assistant Grammarly has been on quite the merry-go-round ride regarding its approach to AI tools in the last few months. Last year, the company launched a new AI feature called’ Expert Review’ that presented editing suggestions inspired by leading professionals, authors and subject-matter experts, without their actual consent. This tool was designed to enhance users’ writing using recreations that were based on ‘publicly available information from third-party LLMs.’

However, in the past few days, the ‘Expert Review’ feature, which was available as a $12-a-month Pro subscription, drew an overwhelmingly negative response, with the company also facing a lawsuit by journalist Julia Angwin, who claimed that the tool violated privacy and publicity rights by using her identity for commercial purposes without permission. Similarly, other journalists also slammed the tool for stealing their work and identity without any prior consent.

In light of this backlash, Superhuman has announced that it is disabling this controversial ‘Expert Review’ feature. The company’s CEO, Shishir Mehrotra, wrote in a LinkedIn post: “After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review as we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented—or not represented at all.”

On paper, the feature sounds great, as Grammarly was giving writers the opportunity to write in a style or format of how a seasoned journalist or editor might write. The problem was that none of those experts had actually given permission or contributed to the presented feedback, or even consented to be included in the first place. The ‘Expert Review’ feature has also been criticised for its major inaccuracies. Recently, when author Benjamin Dreyer pasted paragraphs of lorem ipsum, the tool suggested tips from writers like Stephen King.