It’s pretty obvious that Grammarly got it wrong, right? Blame it on the AI. Grammarly’s parent company, Superhuman, is in a tough spot, facing a class-action lawsuit over its use of the names of real experts (and their perceived way of writing, editing, and thinking) in its now-discontinued Expert Reviews feature. The feature relied on AI to guess how an expert like Tom’s Guide’s Mark Spoonauer might guide you in your writing.
The good news is that even Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra agrees that this feature was fundamentally terrible. Talk with The edge Nilay Patel on the Decoder PodcastMehrotra admitted, “This feature was not a good feature. It was not good for experts, it was not good for users.”
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Not getting paid
When Patel repeatedly pressed Mehrotra on how much he planned to pay Patel for the use of his, well, not exactly his likeness, but his personality, Mehrotra made it clear that he didn’t believe Superhuman owed these experts anything for using their names and way of thinking (based on what the LLMs were able to glean from the Internet). Instead, he repeatedly turned to the idea that Grammarly (Superhuman) was more like YouTube.
“I think our main goal is to create a platform much like YouTube. You should choose to be on our platform. You should be able to choose and create an experience that you trust. You have to choose your business model. When you choose your business model, you should get paid for your contributions. That’s the model we’re working on. That’s really where I want to be.”
So, on the one hand, Mehrotra admitted that the expert review was flawed and perhaps poorly executed (despite the fact that it had been around for months but was so deeply buried that many didn’t notice it). On the other hand, Superhuman (and Grammarly) will continue to rely heavily on AI to help experts create monetizable personas that users can leverage for expert advice.
Theoretically, getting paid for using our knowledge is, on the surface, a good thing, but Grammarly’s push toward AI has been, over the years, a slippery slope and one that hasn’t demonstrably improved the product.
Grammarly, I knew you when
The fact is, I’ve been using Grammarly for years. In 2021, I’ve documented many generally positive experiences with the tool that can live in your browser, look at everything you write, and try to help you improve it.
Much of my usage involved cleaning up spelling mistakes and typos, but I appreciated the occasional help with grammar. Any major errors are highlighted in a helpful red and you simply hover over the offending word or phrase for a suggested solution, which you select to accept the correction.
Over time, however, Grammarly has become more insistent, with offers of premium support (I’ve never paid for the service) and pop-up boxes that promise to correct your writing but mostly block your view until you dismiss them.
As AI usage increased, Grammarly’s suggestions seemed less and less useful. Granted, I’ve never used the expert review feature and I don’t know if my name/persona can be found there, but some of Grammarly’s suggestions and reviews of my prose seemed wrong/confusing, or lacked proper context.
Follow LLMs
Grammarly had no choice but to delve into AI. After all, millions of people now not only rely on AI like ChatGPT and Gemini to clean up their writing, but sometimes ask LLMs to write for them.
The AI revolution was likely diminishing the perceived usefulness of a quiet but useful writing assistant like Grammarly. The company had to become more aggressive. Renaming yourself Superhuman in 2025 was one of them. The company would no longer be known simply as a grammar assistant. It would be a platform and tool to improve human resources.
Building expert personas to help in this mission is not surprising. After all, AI Persona building is already a cottage industry. Late last year I reviewed Napster View AI. While it has a suite of pre-built personas, it also lets you create your own AI and then add it to the company’s library of experts.
It was mostly weird, but at least Napster asked permission.
Grammarly went ahead and built these AI experts based on real people without asking permission. Yet despite its current problems, Superhuman wants to create a library of AI characters, mainly because the experts want it.
Grammarly went ahead and built these AI experts based on real people without asking permission.
Mehrotra insisted that the idea to build the original system came primarily from his discussions with YouTubers and “a very important book author.”
“They all told me the same thing. It’s a really tough world for experts right now. It’s really hard to make a connection.” What they’re looking for is a more persistent fan connection and apparently the Expert AI character could be a way to achieve that.
Despite this goal, Grammarly (Superhuman) failed: “It really didn’t work one way or the other. We ended up with an experience that was pretty suboptimal for the user and obviously suboptimal for the expert,” Mehrotra told Patel.
Grammarly’s expert reviews could return, assuming any expert wants to work with them, with both real expert authorization and revenue sharing between Superhuman and the living, breathing expert.
Whether or not this moves forward will likely depend on the outcome of Angwin’s class-action lawsuit.
A little expert personality test
Meanwhile, I was struck by something else Mehrotra said. He was talking about how desperate people are to need advice from someone they admire: “They’re trying to do that today with LLMs. They go to ChatGPT and Claude and say, “What would Nilay think of my writing?” That’s what inspired what the user was trying to do.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini could not only help you improve your writing, but could also benefit from advice from well-known writers.
As an experiment, I handed Gemini a link to a general technology news article from TechRadar and asked, “If Lance Ulanoff read and edited this post, what would he say?”
The response was detailed and compared the original text with how I might approach the text. It even created a potential social media post with my voice. When I replaced him with Nilay Patel of The Verge, the response was no less detailed. Gemini compared my approach to his and, yes, wrote a conclusion in true Patel fashion. Naturally, I had to try Stephen King. The LLM gave it the same treatment, with a detailed analysis of the writing and a King-like conclusion.
My point is, yes, what Grammarly did was wrong and off-putting. Offering “experts” as if they had permission is wrong (the fine print makes it clear that they don’t, and they weren’t the real people), but it’s just a step away from what’s possible today on most other AI mager platforms.
Gemini didn’t hesitate to try to write in my voice, Patel’s voice, or King’s voice. None of us are paid for the analysis offered on our behalf.
Perhaps the Grammarly/Superhuman lawsuit will set a precedent for the use of our characters in all kinds of media. But I doubt it. At best, this is settled amicably; in the worst case, it is rejected entirely. At least Grammarly was embarrassed to remove this feature. But like a game of whack-a-mole, this won’t be the last army of pirates to take our names in vain.
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