Grammarly cloned me without permission; another AI offered $2,000 to do the same

Two weeks ago I discovered an AI company was selling a product with my name on it. The ways in which AI has made our lives worse in the last few years feels, on some level, personal: from the RAMpocalypse and Nvidia’s pivot to AI datacenters to Google rewriting journalists’ headlines and scraping our work into bland “AI overviews.” Grammarly didn’t tell the experts it was cloning.

It presumably mass scraped entire bodies of work and fed them into a model that then spat out awful editing advice. As Wired noted, the software claimed to take “inspiration” from writers such as William Strunk Jr., Margaret Mitchell and Pierre Bourdieu, then offered such guidance as “Replace repetition with vivid, varied sentence patterns.” Grammarly later set up an opt-out email and faces a class action, but the moment felt like a warning that didn’t slow anyone down.

grammarly, ai cloning, data scraping, class action, opt-out, editing advice, william strunk, margaret mitchell, pierre bourdieu, nvidia