The inadequacy of Grammarly’s apology

If you hijacked the names and content of experts to boost your own product and then realized that perhaps you’d made a mistake, how would you apologize?

Here’s what Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly parent company Superhuman, posted on LinkedIn, once he realized that his product impersonating experts without their permission was a mistake:

Back in August, we launched a Grammarly agent called Expert Review. The agent draws on publicly available information from third-party LLMs to surface writing suggestions inspired by the published work of influential voices.

Over the past week, we received valid critical feedback from experts who are concerned that the agent misrepresented their voices. This kind of scrutiny improves our products, and we take it seriously. As context, the agent was designed to help users discover influential perspectives and scholarship relevant to their work, while also providing meaningful ways for experts to build deeper relationships with their fans. We hear the feedback and recognize we fell short on this. I want to apologize and acknowledge that we’ll rethink our approach going forward.

After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review while 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.

We deeply believe in our mission to solve the “last mile of AI” by bringing AI directly to where people work, and we see this as a significant opportunity for experts. For millions of users, Grammarly is a trusted writing sidekick — ever-present in every application, ready to help. We’re opening up this platform so anyone can build agents that work like Grammarly — expanding from one sidekick to a whole team. Imagine your professor sharpening your essay, your sales leader reshaping a customer pitch, a thoughtful critic challenging your arguments, or a leading expert elevating your proposal. For experts, this is a chance to build that same ubiquitous bond with users, much like Grammarly has. But in this world, experts choose to participate, shape how their knowledge is represented, and control their business model. That future excites me, and I hope to build it with experts who want to develop it alongside us.

What’s wrong with this apology?

To apologize effectively, you must acknowledge what you did wrong. Mehrotra writes “[W]e received valid critical feedback. We hear the feedback and recognize we fell short on this. I want to apologize.” In this “apology” there is no acknowledgement that the company did wrong, only that it “fell short.”

There’s no indication that they know what they did wrong — just that there was “valid critical feedback.”

There’s no acknowledgement of who their actions hurt — the writers whose names were used without permission.

They will do nothing to help those they hurt. The limit of their remorse was yanking the feature.

As for the future, they will “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.” That’s it.

As for “we see this as a significant opportunity for experts,” that sounds like blackmail.

The ever-wise Ann Handley, who was among those whose identities had been ripped off, responded appropriately with this trenchant comment:

Writers, authors, artists, experts are in a tough place with AI: Opt in to having your work used commercially without compensation, or become irrelevant. It’s a binary choice.

Or is it? Grammarly has a real chance to build something different: a model where experts are actually partners, not just raw material. I’m genuinely interested in what you build next, but getting there will require a fundamental shift from the “take first, apologize later” so many AI companies seem to adopt.

Proceed until apprehended

In big tech’s headlong rush to win the AI race, everyone else is roadkill. The central “disruptive” strategy is to do whatever you can get away with, regardless of the rights of content creators, until somebody tries to stop you. Grammarly’s actions are consistent with this attitude. They only stopped because they got caught, not because they thought what they did was wrong.

There can be no apology for this sort of behavior, because the basic attitude has not changed. All that has changed is that Grammarly/Superhuman found out one place where they went out of bounds.

This is not really an apology. It’s somebody who slowed down for a moment when hitting a speed bump, and will very soon resume rushing forward at an unsafe speed.