Grammarly will continue to use authors’ identities without permission unless they opt out

Last week, my colleagues found out Superhuman’s Grammarly has turned me into an AI editorusing my real name, without ever asking my permission. They did the same thing with my boss Nilay Patel, and my colleagues David Pearce and Tom Warren, and – like Wired I mentioned it at the beginning Last Wednesday – Many authors are much more famous than us. Grammarly’s new Expert Review feature uses our names to lend credibility to undeserved AI suggestions.

Now, Grammarly has finally addressed the backlash — but not by apologizing, and not by rolling back the feature. For now, this will graciously give us the opportunity to do so withdraw For something we didn’t know he was doing at first.

The company also provided this statement to Casey and to EdgeFrom Alex Gay, Vice President of Product and Corporate Marketing at Superhuman:

We’ve heard feedback about this tool and appreciate the input from those who took the time to ask thoughtful questions about the functionality and the experts who surfaced. We agree that the product experience can be improved for both users and experts. The agent is designed to help users discover influential perspectives and scholarship that add value to their work. We want the people behind these perspectives to have more control over whether their names are used, while providing new ways for influential voices to reach new audiences. Our goal is to improve expert review to achieve this result.

There’s not a word about “permission” in this statement, and there’s no indication that Grammarly is backing away from the idea. It seems like the company fully intends to keep pretending that real humans are behind its modifications, just with “more control.”

For what it’s worth, we asked Superhuman if it would offer any protection for our names other than an unsubscribe email. This was spokesperson Jane Dakin’s response: “We are working on improving the feature further as well as the opt-out option.”

Superhumans would do well to offer authors “more control” with their name rather than email address, because email is a silly solution to the problem.

How did we know? Are our names assigned unless we try the product ourselves? Don’t people deserve to have their names protected even if they’ve never heard of Grammarly before? Shouldn’t they have this opportunity even if they don’t know anyone who uses Grammarly? Why do we have to do the work of protecting our names at all?

I Don’t use Grammarly, the only reason I found out my name had been hacked was because there were journalists in Edge I decided to test. We can’t do it for everyone.