Now, Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Grammarly’s owner Superhuman, has announced that the company is “disabling” the offending feature “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.”
“Over the past week, we received valid critical feedback from experts who are concerned that the agent misrepresented their voices,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “This kind of scrutiny improves our products, and we take it seriously.”
“We hear the feedback and recognize we fell short on this,” he added. “I want to apologize and acknowledge that we’ll rethink our approach going forward.”
Whether the company’s decision will calm the public outcry remains to be seen.
The feature left much to be desired, highlighting persistent pain points plaguing large language model-based tools like it. Even when author and copy editor Benjamin Dreyer copy-pasted paragraphs of lorem ipsum, which is dummy placeholder text commonly used in graphic design, the feature offered him tips from writers including the venerable novelist Stephen King.
The company seemed to want it both ways — to benefit from the implication of an association with prominent writers while distancing itself in the fine print. A disclaimer spotted by Platformer‘s Casey Newton buried deep in the company’s documentation hedges that references from these experts “are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.” {read}