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Grammarly’s sloppelganger saga
Column Close Column Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Column AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI The Stepback Close The Stepback Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All The Stepback Grammarly’s sloppelganger saga AI-generated ‘Expert Reviews’ weren’t a hit with users or experts. by Stevie Bonifield Close Stevie Bonifield News Writer Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Stevie Bonifield Apr 5, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC Link Share Gift If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Image: Cath Virginia /The Verge, Getty Images Column Close Column Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Column AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI The Stepback Close The Stepback Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All The Stepback Grammarly’s sloppelganger saga AI-generated ‘Expert Reviews’ weren’t a hit with users or experts. by Stevie Bonifield Close Stevie Bonifield News Writer Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Stevie Bonifield Apr 5, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC Link Share Gift If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Stevie Bonifield Close Stevie Bonifield Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Stevie Bonifield is a news writer covering all things consumer tech. Stevie started out at Laptop Mag writing news and reviews on hardware, gaming, and AI. This is The Stepback , a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the ups and downs of AI, follow Stevie Bonifield . The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here . How it started Most people probably know Grammarly for its browser extension that suggests how to spruce up your emails, but over the past few years, it’s been eyeing bigger ambitions. In October, the company formerly known as Grammarly made a public pivot to rebrand as an AI company called Superhuman . The new name was adopted from Superhuman Mail, an AI email platform that Grammarly acquired in June 2025. Superhuman CPO Noam Lovinsky vowed that “the Grammarly brand isn’t going anywhere.” Grammarly would live on as part of Superhuman, but the writing aid’s sidebar would increasingly become a hub for AI agents, rather than just grammar and spelling suggestions. One of the rebrand’s most contentious elements actually appeared a few months prior to that big announcement. In August 2025, Grammarly quietly launched a feature called “Expert Review,” which according to a now-removed help page , offered users “insights from leading professionals, authors, and subject-matter experts.” When a Grammarly user selected the Expert Review button, the feature would generate suggestions “inspired by” relevant experts, under their names alongside a checkmark icon. (What this verified-style icon was supposed to mean remains a mystery.) Screenshots on the feature’s help page showed it using the names of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among other famous writers and academics. The side panel for Expert Review contained a subtle disclaimer stating that references to the experts in the feature “do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.” The feature went largely unnoticed for several months, flying under the radar until March 4th, when Wired reported that it had been spotted using the names of deceased professors to give writing feedback. How it’s going In early March, a couple of us at The Verge tried out Expert Review. All it took was feeding the feature a few drafts of Verge articles before we started seeing our own colleagues’ names emblazoned on Grammarly’s AI-generated suggestions. Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Tom Warren, and Sean Hollister were spotted instantly. None of them gave Grammarly permission to use their likenesses in its feature. On top of that, the suggestions under their names were pretty obtuse, if not annoying — for instance, headline advice inspired by “Nilay Patel” called for “urgency” and “intrigue” by suggesting generic word salad. When The Verge asked if Superhuman thought about notifying the real people “inspiring” these Expert Reviews, Alex Gay, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Superhuman, deflected, instead saying, “The experts in Expert Review appear because their publish
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