Grammarly is using our identities without permission, https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/890921/g..., https://archive.ph/1w1oO
Big difference between "AI, rewrite this passage to sound more like Hunter S Thompson" and "Grammarly-brand unauthorized digital agent Hunter S Thompson, provide a critique of my writing"
Let's see what company values informed this decision [0].
> At Grammarly, it all starts with our EAGER values: Ethical, Adaptable, Gritty, Empathetic, and Remarkable. These values are guiding lights that keep the Grammarly experience compassionate and our business competitive.
Sounds like something I'd expect to see on a banner in an elementary school classroom.
In other words an LLM can spit out a plausible "output of X", however it cannot encode the process that lead X to transform their inputs into their output.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X2...
i can ask it to tell me how to write like a person X right now.
If you built an LLM exclusively on the writings and letters of John Steinbeck, you could NOT tell the LLM to solve an integral for you amd expect it to be right.
Instead what you will receive is a text that follows a statistically derived most likely (in accordance to the perplexity tuning) response to such a question.
If you think “the tacit knowledge and conscious/subconscious reasoning mix that caused X to write like X” can be meaningfully captured by some 1-page “style guide” like llmtropes, I’m not sure what to tell you. Such a style description would be informed by a soup of reviewers that most certainly cannot write like X even with their stronger and more nuanced observations than what the LLM picked up.
Most importantly, negative but unused signals might not be available if the text does not mention it.
This is revolting at so many levels.
Unless they're outright marketing this as "endorsed by" or similar, there is no case.
https://www.chiffandfipple.com/t/kenny-g-as-necrophile-long-...
You don't bring the dead virtually back to life to perform tricks for you.
I probably did not. Then I would have written that. They are fucking over the dead. They are clearly not communicating with the dead.
Generative AI is a plague at this point. Everybody is adding to their wares to see what happens. It's almost like ricing a car. All noise, no go.
We believed this was coming and that the best way to handle it was give the real person control over their persona to grow/edit/change and train it as they see fit.
I actually own the patent on building an expert persona based on the context of the prompt plus the real persons learned information manifold...
If it feels like Grammarly does not respect your right to digital sovereignty, it is because it does not.
Seems pretty likely usage of Grammarly's core product has cratered in the past few years. Not totally hard to imagine one of the big AI labs paying their legal fees in exchange for putting this out there and kick starting the legal process on some of these issues.
So IMO they are just flinging things at the wall trying to find a way back.
It really feels so wrong to spare nobody, not even dead writer/people.
All it's gonna do is something similar to em-dashes where people who use it are now getting called LLM when it was their writing which would've trained LLM (the irony)
If this takes off, hypothetically, we will associate slop with the writing qualities similar to how Ghibli art is so good but it felt so sloppy afterwards and made us less appreciate the Ghibli artstyle seeing just about anyone make it.
The sad part is that most/some of these dead writers/artists were never appreciated by the people of their time and they struggled with so many feelings and writing/art was their way of expressing that. Van Gogh is an example which comes to my mind.[0] Many struggled from depression and other feelings too. To take that and expression of it and turn it into yet another product feels quite depressing for a company to do
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Vincent_van_Gogh
That train left at full steam when companies scraped the whole internet and claimed it was fair use. Now it's a slippery slope covered with slime.
I believe there'll be no slowing down from now on.
They are doing something amazing, will they ask for permission? /s.
Unrelated but surprising to me that I've found built-in grammar checking within JetBrains IDEs far more useful at catching grammar mistakes while not forcing me to rewrite entire sentences.
[1] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12175-natural-languages... [2] https://languagetool.org -- warning: is coated in somewhat-misleading AI keywords [3] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool
Isn't that what grammarly has always been, since long before the invention of the transformer? They give you a long list of suggestions, and unless you write a corporate press release half of them are best ignored. The skill is in choosing which half to ignore
Words paint the picture, but the meaning of the picture is what matters.
One lesson they might draw from the negative press is to offer a more open-ended interface, like ChatGPT, where for years people have already been asking "Pretend you are X and review my writing". This interface design pattern gives the press nowhere to point their angry fingers
For me, Grammarly gives me the same impression as Datadog, but I have no explanation for why I feel that way.
Does it add any value for writers?
"The work is public, hence the name. It's well known, it's in the data. Who cares".
What will they do next? Create similar publications with domainsquatting and write all-AI articles with the "public" names?
Is it still fair use, then?