Grammarly’s new AI feature that provides writing feedback from the purported perspective of noted “experts” is drawing criticism from academics who say the tool appears to “resurrect” scholars to review users’ work.
"Our Expert Review agent examines the writing a user is working on, whether it's a marketing brief or a student project on biodiversity, and leverages our underlying LLM to surface expert content that can help the document's author shape their work,” a Superhuman spokesperson told Decrypt. “The suggested experts depend on the substance of the writing being evaluated.”
The Expert Review agent, the spokesperson explained, doesn’t claim endorsement or direct participation from those experts, but provides “suggestions inspired by works of experts and points users toward influential voices whose scholarship they can then explore more deeply.”
“The experts in Expert Review appear because their published works are publicly available and widely cited,” they said.
When testing the feature for this article, expert reviewers suggested by the app included Margaret Sullivan, media columnist and former editor at the New York Times, Jack Shafer, former senior media writer at Politico, and Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law. Other options included AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and Helen Nissenbaum, professor of information science at Cornell Tech.
While the feature aims to help students and professionals improve their writing abilities, Vanessa Heggie, professor of history at the University of Birmingham, questioned whether the “reviewers” gave their consent before the company used them in the app.
Brielle Harbin, a former associate professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy, called it “an odd and concerning development.”
Grammarly is just one of the companies creating AI programs designed to mimic real people.
