Grammarly will face a class action lawsuit over its “Expert Review” feature that dispensed writing advice using the names of prominent journalists, academics, and authors, Wired reported on Wednesday.
Technology journalist Julia Angwin is the only named plaintiff on the original filing. Angwin’s lawyer, Peter Romer-Friedman, said on Thursday morning that he’s since heard from “40 to 50 people” who object to being featured in the AI-powered editing tool without their consent.From the lawsuit:
Contrary to the apparent belief of some tech companies, it is unlawful to appropriate peoples’ names and identities for commercial purposes, whether those people are famous or not. Through this action, Ms. Angwin seeks to stop Grammarly and its owner, Superhuman, from trading on her name and those of hundreds of other journalists, authors, editors, and even lawyers, and to stop Grammarly from attributing words to them that they never uttered and advice that they never gave.
The uproar over what writer Ingrid Burrington memorably dubbed Grammarly’s “sloppelgangers” has been fairly universal. Featured experts were outraged their likenesses were used without their consent. Others were specifically annoyed at the “anodyne” advice the borrowed identities were dishing out. Angwin, for one, told Wired she reviewed some of the suggestions only to be surprised “at how bad [the advice] was.”
“The law can play a really important role in ensuring that people have control over their name, their identity, their image, and the work product that’s associated with them. That’s an important aspect of this,” Romer-Friedman said. “It seems really wrong and immoral to attribute professional feedback and comments to editors and journalists and authors when that’s what they do for a living and [when] they have no control over this tool.”
The parent company behind Grammarly, Superhuman, first responded to the controversy by telling Platformer founder Casey Newton — a featured “expert” himself — that journalists can opt out by emailing [email protected]. Then, after what the CEO of Superhuman described as “careful consideration,” Grammarly said it would disable the AI-powered feature until it could “make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented — or not represented at all.”
In an emailed statement, Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra acknowledged Angwin’s suit and that the Expert Review feature had “missed the mark” for both experts and users.
“We announced that Expert Review was being taken down for a redesign before the claim was filed, and in its short lifespan it had very little usage. We are sorry, and we will rethink our approach going forward,” Mehrotra said. “We have reviewed the lawsuit, and we believe the legal claims are without merit and will strongly defend against them. Regardless, there is a better approach to bringing experts onto our platform and we are working on a version that will provide significantly more benefit to both users and experts.”
As the lawsuit notes, Angwin is an award-winning journalist who cofounded the data-driven investigative tech news site The Markup (now merged with fellow nonprofit outlet CalMatters) and, before that, reported and edited at ProPublica and The Wall Street Journal.
“I don’t think there’s anyone else in the tech journalism community who has had as big of an impact on corporate practices as Julia in the past decade,” Romer-Friedman said.
“I do see this challenge as part of the fight!” she said in an email.
You can read the class action complaint on DocumentCloud here.
