Remember being a teacher’s pet? Or how about that one professor whose margin notes actually made you a better writer? Grammarly thinks you want that feeling back, but with a twist: they’ve built a feature that lets you get simulated feedback from famous authors and academics—some of whom have been dead for decades. And they didn’t ask anyone’s permission.
Grammarly started as a spelling and grammar checker, the kind of tool you’d run a résumé through before hitting submit. Over the years, it’s piled on generative AI features like a kid stacking blocks. In October, CEO Shishir Mehrotra announced the company was rebranding as Superhuman, though the writing tool itself still goes by Grammarly. Mehrotra’s press release was the usual Silicon Valley boilerplate: “When technology works everywhere, it starts to feel ordinary. And that usually means something extraordinary is happening under the hood.”
Sure, Jan.
The expanded platform now offers an AI chatbot that answers questions while you draft, a paraphraser that tweaks your style, a “humanizer” that adjusts tone, an AI grader that predicts college scores, and even tools to flag phrases that sound too much like they were written by an LLM—because nothing says “authentic writing” like using AI to hide the fact that you used AI.
But the feature that’s raising eyebrows is the “expert review” option. Instead of a generic critique from some nameless model, you get a list of real people—living and dead—whose simulated feedback you can call on. Stephen King. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Carl Sagan. William Zinsser. The disclaimer is buried in fine print: “References to experts in this product are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.” In other words, these people had nothing to do with this, and they probably don’t want to be associated with it.
I reached out to King and Tyson for comment. Neither responded. Shocking.
Jen Dakin, senior communications manager at Superhuman, explained the feature in a statement: “Our Expert Review agent examines the writing a user is working on, whether it’s a marketing brief or a student project on biodiversity, and leverages our underlying LLM to surface expert content that can help the document’s author shape their work. The suggested experts depend on the substance of the writing being evaluated. The Expert Review agent doesn’t claim endorsement or direct participation from those experts; it provides suggestions inspired by works of experts and points users toward influential voices whose scholarship they can then explore more deeply.”
“Inspired by” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. These AI agents are presumably trained on the authors’ published works, which raises a whole stack of legal and ethical questions. Copyright lawsuits are already piling up against companies that scrape content without permission, and this feels like a textbook example of the same problem.
Vanessa Heggie, an associate professor at the University of Birmingham, posted a grim example on LinkedIn. She shared a screenshot showing the option to get analysis from an AI agent modeled on David Abulafia, an English historian who died in January. “Obscene,” she wrote. C.E. Aubin, a historian and postdoctoral fellow at Yale, called the feature “pretty insulting” and noted that it “seems to validate the profound mistrust so many scholars in the humanities have for AI and its seemingly constant use in fundamentally unethical ways.”
Aubin added: “These are not expert reviews, because there are no ‘experts’ involved in producing them. And it’s pretty insulting to see scholarship used this way when the academic humanities are currently under attack from every possible angle—as though the actual people who do the thinking and produce the scholarship are reducible to their work itself and can be removed entirely from the equation.” She called the reanimation of the dead “awful” and “cynical.”
An independent review by WIRED tested the tool and found it recommending feedback from agents based on Steven Pinker, Gary Marcus, William Strunk Jr., Pierre Bourdieu, Margaret Mitchell, and Virginia Tufte—most of whom are dead. The guidance from Tufte’s AI agent was: “Replace repetition with vivid, varied sentence patterns.” Riveting.
Beyond the ethics, there’s the practical question: does any of this actually help? Grammarly’s plagiarism detector, for instance, failed to catch a direct quotation in the test. So you’re paying for a feature that can’t even do its basic job, while the company trades on the names of people who can’t consent.
This feels like the logical endpoint of the AI hype cycle. We’ve moved from “let’s make writing easier” to “let’s build a machine that pretends to be a dead historian and critique your essay.” It’s not innovation. It’s necromancy with a subscription fee.
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