{"id":9386,"date":"2026-03-12T14:12:53","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T14:12:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/grammarly-apology-lawsuit\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T14:12:53","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T14:12:53","slug":"grammarly-apology-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/grammarly-apology-lawsuit\/","title":{"rendered":"Grammarly Forgot to Mention Something in Its Giant Apology That Changes the Whole Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Grammarly\u2019s \u201cExpert Review\u201d feature, which was quietly rolled out last year, angered countless journalists, authors, and academics, who found that they were being impersonated without their permission.<\/p>\n

Following an enormous backlash \u2014 and telling people being impersonated that they should email the company to opt out<\/a> \u2014 Grammarly\u2019s parent company, Superhuman, made a sudden reversal.<\/p>\n

In a Wednesday LinkedIn post, CEO Shishir Mehrotra publicly apologized<\/a> in a wordy post, saying that \u201cover the past week, we received valid critical feedback from experts who are concerned that the agent misrepresented their voices.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hear the feedback and recognize we fell short on this,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

What Mehrotra failed to mention was that the company wasn\u2019t just dealing with hundreds of furious writers \u2014 it was facing litigation as well. Nonprofit news organization The Markup<\/em> editor-in-chief Julia Angwin filed a class action lawsuit<\/a> in the Southern District of New York on Wednesday afternoon, right around the time Mehrotra issued his apology.<\/p>\n

As Wired<\/em> reports<\/a>, the suit doesn\u2019t call for a specific amount of damages, but suggests it\u2019s at least $5 million.<\/p>\n

The suit \u201cchallenges Grammarly\u2019s misappropriation of the names and identities of hundreds of journalists, authors, writers, and editors to earn profits for Grammarly and its owner, Superhuman.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cI have worked for decades honing my skills as a writer and editor, and I am distressed to discover that a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise,\u201d said Angwin in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Superhuman appears to have been blindsided by the outrage its impersonating bot stirred up.<\/p>\n

In a statement to Wired<\/em> just before the claim was filed, Superhuman director for product management Ailian Gan said that it had \u201cbuilt the agent to help users tap into the insights of thought leaders and experts and to give experts new ways to share their knowledge and reach new audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBased on the feedback we\u2019ve received, we clearly missed the mark,\u201d she added. \u201cWe are sorry and will do things differently going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Angwin\u2019s lawyer, Peter Romer-Friedman, is confident the lawsuit had merit. In New York and California, state laws clearly forbid the commercial use of a person\u2019s name and likeness without express permission.<\/p>\n

\u201cLegally, we think it\u2019s a pretty straightforward case,\u201d he told Wired<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Romer-Friedman also touched on a much larger situation playing out, as large language models continue to scrape copyrighted materials across the web, often without the required licenses, triggering a litany of other lawsuits. <\/p>\n

\u201cMore broadly, one of the reasons why we\u2019re filing this case is, you know, we can see what\u2019s happening in our society: that lots of professionals who spend years, or in Julia\u2019s case decades, honing a skill or a trade, then see that their name or their skills are being appropriated by others without their consent,\u201d he told Wired<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Angwin found out she was being impersonated through Casey Newton\u2019s Platformer<\/em><\/a>. She told Wired<\/em> that her virtual twin was doling out horrible advice, like creating unwieldy sentences that \u201cmade it harder to understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was surprised at how bad it was,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

More on the feature:<\/strong> Grammarly Is Pulling Down Its Explosively Controversial Feature That Impersonates Writers Without Their Permission<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post Grammarly Forgot to Mention Something in Its Giant Apology That Changes the Whole Story<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Grammarly\u2019s \u201cExpert Review\u201d feature, which was quietly rolled out last year, angered countless journalists, authors, and academics, who found that they were being impersonated without their permission. Following an enormous…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,3841],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-ethics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}