Commentary: Why an AI firm known for fighting plagiarism has real authors in a fury
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The online service Grammarly originated in 2009 as a suite of tools to help ferret out plagiarism in schoolwork or help students hone their grammar and spelling.Eventually it incorporated artificial intelligence bots as sources of its writing assistance.In August 2025, however, the firm stepped way over the line of what is — or should be — permissible as an AI-generated service.
This was its “expert review” service, available to those willing to fork over up to $30 a month.The pitch was that subscribers could get their writing samples reviewed by established writers, including some household names as Stephen King and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and receive feedback from them about how to improve their prose.This is an area I cover and there have been a lot of lows.
But I still feel like this is a new low.— Julia Angwin, technology journalist and plaintiff in a lawsuit against GrammarlyA few problems have surfaced about this.First, it appears that many, if not all, the cited “experts” haven’t granted Grammarly permission to use their names or work in connection with this service.Second, none of them actually reviewed the submitted writing samples — the samples were screened by AI bots, which generated the suggestions based on the authors’ published works.
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Third, Grammarly didn’t make the truth clear to its users — the suggestions seemed on first impression to come directly from the cited “experts”; it was only when a user clicked through for more detail that Grammarly disclosed that its suggestions were “inspired” by the experts’ published works.Last week, Grammarly suspended the “expert review” function.
That happened the same day that Julia Angwin, a veteran technology and investigative journalist who has worked...