I loved Grammarly. But it has changed post LLM boom. The underlying concept was awesome as they take grammatical rules from a book of english grammar rules into a linter. Then it let you select the tone and adjusted some for marketing/engagement so it sounds good on Twitter. I have severe dyslexia and struggled with tone.
Lately, like following ChatGPT 3.5 release era, I had found Grammarly now replacing entire sentences with LLM replacement which are random and inject bias to being near useless. It did this some before. The problem is I can't even tell if it's defensible from a grammatical point when it uses an LLM to do this. At some point Grammarly reached too far in the cookie jar and I no longer trusted that someone who read the Grammar rule book verified any part of the elaborate suggestions.
I haven't logged in for months. I guess I was no longer learning from it. I need to take a closer look but sys admin outrage from pushy sales people doesn't bode well in my mind.
The same fate hit deepl. What most english users don't know is that translation from english to another language was always at best - horrible and not usable without much manual effort. The same goes the other way around when you are writing technical documents.
Deepl however - 7-8 or more years ago was bright star - i do not say this lightly but their translation (i can only vouch for german<->english) was out of this world in comparison to everything else like google translate, yahoo or whatever.
It was basically so good - i just kept writing in english even though its not my first language but its easier for technical documentation and i use it to translate back to german instead of doing it the other way around.
But then, when the first mass hysteria of chatgpt 1 etc hits - it good worse fast - nowadays - it can not do any good translation service at all - it is far worse than what the competition offered 7-8 years ago! It makes no sense a lot of times.
What is Grammarly anymore, even? Is it Superhuman? Is it Fathom? And what are either of those even?
Even before all that, I switched to Quillbot because Grammarly would always mess up the formatting in my emails in gmail (but only when you viewed it from mobile). Quillbot isn't totally better than that, but at least its cheaper.
I think Grammarly is quite obviously in trouble since LLMs went so mainstream. And while I think AI-powered replacements are a great threat, I reckon an even bigger one is the decline of writing itself.
If Gmail suggests the whole email (and whatever model it's using has baked in whatever suggestions Grammarly would've had), nobody needs feedback on an email they didn't even write?
I began noticing (right before their acceptance of AI, c2024) that grammarly (and translation sites) were offering (what seemed like at the time) "lifetime subscriptions to soon-to-be obsolete tech" – the writing was already so-obviously written upon walls that ChatGPT was an industry re-writer.
But think of how productive you'll be when everyone slops you emails and then you have an agent slop you a summary of all the slops you got slopped into your slop box!
Grammarly was a great idea in the pre-AI era. Now I bet they're losing a lot with so many AI solutions that are better integrated across every ecosystem.
Some people will argue that Grammarly still has a better suggestion system, but models have become increasingly good at writing. I think this product and its revenue model will become obsolete pretty soon.
> but models have become increasingly good at writing.
That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.
I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.
HN readers are not average people. elsewhere i see people using AI to write without any blowback. maybe they don't want to ruffle feathers, but they are engaging, whereas i prefer to just skip over AI generated posts.
this. My not-at-all technical partner often comments to me that whatever youtuber is reading from an ai script and just turns off whatever we're watching. I assume similar happens in other areas.
For her its rarely the specific tells ("not-x-but-y" etc) but rather its bad metaphors and analogies that get her.
Most people don't care what the other person thinks about their email so long as their boss thinks they are doing their job (and their boss is usually the one paying/telling them to use AI) and the other side responds. Should they? Probably, but everyone should probably do a lot of things we don't.
I feel a tinge when I see an AI written email that is longer than it needs to be/boring to read but I still need to engage whatever it was they were emailing about anyways.
that's what i do, but the posts still get engagement, and it's the same level of engagement as the non-AI posts by the same people, which tells me they are not put off by the AI-writing.
Not my experience at all on non-technical online spaces. For example, people try posting AI garbage on sports message boards and everyone dunks on them for posting slop.
These spaces are filled with people barely technically literate enough to post and AI is still viewed very negatively
I suspect they're also losing a lot of university subscriptions after they started advertising how they offer a service to make LLM-written text look human-written, if I recall correctly they even explicitly advertised that you could use it to cheat. I don't know what they were thinking with that marketing campaign given that universities are probably one of their biggest market segments.
That is a very bad shortening for "pre-laymen-take-of-AI". Let us try to keep language clean at least here.
If the product in question replaces a tutor, it is AI ("simulation of intelligence"). We cannot restrict the term "AI" to "giving a broader appearance of intelligence with less trust in the results". Either this is still the "AI era" (post cybernetics, post Dartmouth), or we are not there yet.
For those in Europe, this kind of behaviour usually is taken care by consumer protection agencies, fill in a complaint /report them, in you jurisdiction.
Unless you're in country A and ordered from country B (both in Europe), in which case the consumer protection agency from country A may just tell you "well they're not in our country so we can't do much, try contacting the European consumer agency, which after spending 30 minutes finding their form, and checking that you do qualify (which you won't, for some stupid reason like "did you try calling them nicely and sending a letter and waiting for 30 days?"), they will just say "ok cool we sent them an e-mail, we'll tell you how all of this will work out".
Or maybe I'm just in a bad European country who pulls this kind of demotivating stints every time I have this kind of problem.
I've tried it, a dozen times, in two European countries with, on paper, strong data protection laws. Every single time, after anemic back-and-forth, the national data protection agency basically told me "they say it's fine and you opted in, nothing we can do".
Sometimes you really hit a dead end. Some orgs just don't respond, or say they don't have the resources to process your complaint, or lie. The codified consumer protection laws are nice, in principle. Multinationals know they can get away with pretty much anything.
Fair. The agencies are one tool, but the payment intermediary is usually the one that actually moves - a chargeback often does more than an ECC complaint ever will
Yes - unfortunately this looks to be completely irrelevant to consumer protection.
"A contractor of my employer asked me to contact another member of my organisation to persuade them to do something commercially advantageous for them" - at no point is anyone here a consumer.
Business emails are subject to fairly different rules by the looks of it:
https://tietosuoja.fi/en/faq-direct-marketing ("Can a person working in a company be sent direct electronic marketing") - it appears there's a fair bit of an exception that doesn't require consent.
Here in Australia unless that particular user that received the emails gave consent to receive marketing emails (and the emails have identification + unsubscribe) it would be violating our Spam act.
The principle here, for anyone confused, is that a consumer has very weak negotiating power against a business and therefore needs basic rights, but when two businesses negotiate, it's a level playing field and if they wanted those rights they would've been easily able to get them.
According to https://superhuman.com/legal/dpa they claim that their role is processor. Processor is only allowed to use personal data they obtained from controller under controller's documented instructions. Unless those included authorization to send such an email to controller's users it's quite likely that they exceeded those. GDPR-wise (and likely that DPA-wise) that is a breach on it's own.
Good luck actually getting them to do something. Also "Europe" is an entire continent with many different countries and laws, you might want to be more specific.
I reported a brand of baby formula that made our kid very sick, in light of the contamination of fish oil. Not even a week later they had gone to the shop and tested the batch.
The difference isn’t nil, but the point is that these institutions can be quite effective.
I’ve reported issues to the DPA (Data Protection Agency) of Belgium and they handled it reasonably well, which I didn’t expect either.
Marketing tactics are part of consumer issues and many countries seem to have good consumer protection laws. Of course Grammarly’s issue was towards/against a business, and that colours the problem. I think the damage to their reputation is enough punishment, but there might be other ways to tackle this.
I merely fail to see the point of “oh well, the Humanity, what can we do”. Apathy is death.
Lmao no. First press games are a scammer company based in Germany. I reported them to the Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband...nothing.
I reported them to the UKICC and got a reply after like 7 months asking for more information (I'd given them plenty) and that they were very busy and it would probably take another year to look at it. I told them not to bother.
I have a different experience, Verbraucherzentrale has helped me putting Vodafone on their place regarding a phone contract that seemed almost impossible to cancel.
I abhor when SaaS products attempt this. I see crap all the time in ClickUp (a particularly horrible product) trying to get me to request access to something no in our plan. It's so clearly trying to drum up (nearly)fake support for wanting a feature. They try to be innocuous but I find it incredibly disrespectful when a SaaS is littered with "Upgrade" or "Bug your manager to upgrade" buttons/CTAs.
See also the persistent "Upgrade" button in my Google Mail (Workspace) UI trying to get me to upgrade to a higher plan level.
Makes me nostalgic, what a saver this tool has been throughout my time. Never in the world did I believe that my spelling mistakes would in the future be seen as authentic.
Only within the web page that's running it. Grammarly is often installed to the system and slurps up whatever it can, even when you haven't explicitly told it to. I think this was the article that illustrated its untrustworthiness:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30470457
They are an AI business, just a more focused one. The creepy information gathering, the way it blandifies output and encourages reliance over building communication and language skills, it's all the same problems frontier companies have writ small. Their lunch is being eaten by bigger fish and they're shamelessly trying to remain relevant. This will not result in any less spying or bad behavior.
I work at a company that we jokingly call a "SaaS Paradise", since nothing is built in house, and when it is, it's crap. All these companies do the same thing with the popups, e-mails, Slack messages (!) warning of cancellation or change of terms. It looks like collective desperation that is just accelerating post-LLM.
I have a rule, if I hear an advert that I didn't search for on any video site, I say "fuck off <company name>" to ensure I form a negative association with the brand. I've definitely heard "grammarly" far too many times to ever spend a penny on them.
Sad to see this. We had student licenses at our university for writing theses and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even as an (ex)native speaker. Felt more like working with an editor than the “helpful coworker” vibe of current AI tools.
Never understood their browser integration though, ugh. Scanning private messages was already a bad look, I shouldn’t be surprised…
Slack notifies all admins of a workspace if a payment failed :)
But then it's only admins, not all users, and it may make sense in case the workspace owner is distracted/incapacitated etc.
What ruins the "we care about your workspace" part though is how the message is phrased as a threat. Fail to pay and you'll lose acces to this and that and that other thing...
Slack tries to sell to employees as well though, there are feature CTAs I see all the time trying to get me to express interest so they can tell the admin/owner of the account "Your employees want this feature, pay us more money".
I took Grammarly's side, since we used a few SaaS and the CFO (small company for context) revoked access and we had to beg him. Reading the comments about multiple SaaS annoying end users changed my mind.
I don't see a problem with this. B2B2C is a tricky dance with many stakeholders whose business needs are often ignored. If procurement cancels a service that users need without telling the users, which they have been known to do, that's a big problem.
Sounds a bit disproportionate. If you do that, you better hope the vendor's CEO and your company's CEO are not golfing buddies.
And in my mind, one email alert or pop-up to all current users letting them know the service is going away (in case they had not been told which is as I've said before often the case in large orgs) is very far from the definition of spam.
Conversely, I would not work for a CEO who would block me from doing my job duties. I'm hired to do a job. If I can't do that job, there's no point in being here. Other companies will pay me for my judgment.
If this happened in real life, I'd say "Joe," (because I'm on a first-name basis with the CEO and chat with him daily), "we had to block communications from Tom's company because they're pulling some bonkers stuff. You might let him know that he's pissing off customers right and left and needs to knock it off."
And yes, this is 100% the definition of spam. It's literally unsolicited commercial communication. Sending these mass instructions to flood the local IT admins is an enormous breech of trust.
It depends on what you mean by “good alternative”.
We use a self-hosted OSS LanguageTool server that's containerized and runs in a private, on-prem cluster to provide good performance and be HA, but it only works on our corporate network or when using a VPN connection while roaming/remote.
It's incredibly reliable.
It's also devoid of AI/LLM bullshit for writing. Spelling and grammar rules, a few notes about long sentences, that's it.
However, LanguageTool nerfs their other plugins (like mail plugins) to require a subscription service.
I've pleaded with them for years to please allow me to pay a subscription price but use our internal server simply because we don't want/need a spelling/grammar tool to send content to the cloud.
We don't want free. We want private.
The odd thing is that the official LanguageTool browser plugins DO allow use of a self-hosted LanguageTool server; clearly it's doable. There's a poorly maintained obsidian plugin that also works(ish). But that's about it.
A properly funded education works only if you pair it with writing practice and continued correction of grammatical errors that creep in as you develop writing habits. A properly funded education doesn't fix grammatical errors caused by language-processing deficits. Tools like Grammarly give the language-deficient writer more confidence and willingness to write. To me, they are as essential as a spell checker.
A properly funded public education doesn't cover speech-recognition-driven errors. I've talked about this before, but when you write using speech recognition, you need to shift from speaking spoken speech to speaking written speech.
Spoken speech is very sloppy with grammar. We forgive a tremendous amount of detail, forgive a lot of errors because we're focused on what they are saying, not how they are saying it. Grammarly also catches speech-recognition errors.
The usual retort is that one should spend more energy on proofreading your writing; many speech recognition users come to understand that your brain sees what you said, not what's on the page. The fix is to stick your writing in a drawer long enough to forget what you wrote, which isn't a great plan when you need an email in 5 minutes.
Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now, and I'll see how well it works over the following days, but assuming it works right for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and go to this package (assuming it's a saner company).
Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, as I thought Grammarly did improve my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.
I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.
---- Below is the above corrected by grammarly
Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now and will see how well it works over the next few days, but if it works for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and switch to this package (assuming it's a saner company).
Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, since I thought Grammarly improved my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.
I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.
[Edit: Corrected a sentence that was missed by both Grammarly and LanguageTool. See if you can figure out which one it was]
i wonder how much of this is a consequence of AI...
Most analytics tools have the ability to create segments (for example, you could create a group of users who are part of an account that is not going to renew their plan).
And then they have the ability to send emails and notifications to users in a segment.
I wonder how much companies are running agents with access to their analytics tools, and letting them build their own campaigns.
I asked ChatGPT to design a campaign to reduce churn for a SaaS like Grammarly, and it came up with a very similar idea.
I'm surprised people get worked up about this. I've felt like folks have learned to tolerate much worse and manipulative behavior from companies in the last two decades of personal computing... Not that I like it. I believed that society kind of accepted dystopia. Is it just that people are more sensitive because this happened in a corporate setting?
It's in the sysadmin sub because we are routinely the people told buy and manage Grammarly deployments, and we're the people generally cancelling those services now given everyone is being pushed to use their flavor of AI instead. And those emails from users upset that we're doing what management told us to do (following this Grammarly advice)? They go from end users to sysadmins.
I think "unhinged" is a ridiculous word for it. They aren't crazy.
"Outrageous" is better. This will work on a lot of people, and they really will email their managers, because they're sheep. But it won't actually change the managers' minds for the positive. If I got wind of a plot like this against my decision, it would absolutely convince me to stay the course.
If the employees want to complain, I'll listen. If they're encouraged to complain, forget it.
I loved Grammarly. But it has changed post LLM boom. The underlying concept was awesome as they take grammatical rules from a book of english grammar rules into a linter. Then it let you select the tone and adjusted some for marketing/engagement so it sounds good on Twitter. I have severe dyslexia and struggled with tone.
Lately, like following ChatGPT 3.5 release era, I had found Grammarly now replacing entire sentences with LLM replacement which are random and inject bias to being near useless. It did this some before. The problem is I can't even tell if it's defensible from a grammatical point when it uses an LLM to do this. At some point Grammarly reached too far in the cookie jar and I no longer trusted that someone who read the Grammar rule book verified any part of the elaborate suggestions.
I haven't logged in for months. I guess I was no longer learning from it. I need to take a closer look but sys admin outrage from pushy sales people doesn't bode well in my mind.
The same fate hit deepl. What most english users don't know is that translation from english to another language was always at best - horrible and not usable without much manual effort. The same goes the other way around when you are writing technical documents.
Deepl however - 7-8 or more years ago was bright star - i do not say this lightly but their translation (i can only vouch for german<->english) was out of this world in comparison to everything else like google translate, yahoo or whatever.
It was basically so good - i just kept writing in english even though its not my first language but its easier for technical documentation and i use it to translate back to german instead of doing it the other way around.
But then, when the first mass hysteria of chatgpt 1 etc hits - it good worse fast - nowadays - it can not do any good translation service at all - it is far worse than what the competition offered 7-8 years ago! It makes no sense a lot of times.
Looks like approx 7 years ago was DeepL's first Series A - https://tracxn.com/d/companies/deepl/__mTFDDSjOlFbUE5DY_w1NW... - they got funding from btov and Benchmark
Benchmark is very AI-pilled: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-is-replacing-j... and is very bullish on it, too: https://gtmnow.com/benchmark-ai-startup-investing-chetan-put...
it also looks like DeepL went from using a CNN engine to an LLM in 2024 (coinciding with its $2 billion valuation and Series C) which is likely why it seems to hallucinate a lot more now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator#Translation_m...
I suspect Google did the same thing with docs. The last time I tried it, about 10% of the suggestions were simply incorrect.
I need to find an old school grammar checker that works on the command line with markdown.
> I need to find an old school grammar checker that works on the command line with markdown.
You might be interested in Val - https://docs.vale.sh/
What is Grammarly anymore, even? Is it Superhuman? Is it Fathom? And what are either of those even?
Even before all that, I switched to Quillbot because Grammarly would always mess up the formatting in my emails in gmail (but only when you viewed it from mobile). Quillbot isn't totally better than that, but at least its cheaper.
I think Grammarly is quite obviously in trouble since LLMs went so mainstream. And while I think AI-powered replacements are a great threat, I reckon an even bigger one is the decline of writing itself.
If Gmail suggests the whole email (and whatever model it's using has baked in whatever suggestions Grammarly would've had), nobody needs feedback on an email they didn't even write?
Grammarly does use AI https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-to-acquire-... since 2025.
I began noticing (right before their acceptance of AI, c2024) that grammarly (and translation sites) were offering (what seemed like at the time) "lifetime subscriptions to soon-to-be obsolete tech" – the writing was already so-obviously written upon walls that ChatGPT was an industry re-writer.
Don’t forget that email won’t actually be read on the receiving side either. The recipient will just ask their LLM to summarize it in a few bullets.
Yea, I routinely receive giant tomes of meeting minutes littered with inaccuracies, and frankly, I find it unprofessional
But think of how productive you'll be when everyone slops you emails and then you have an agent slop you a summary of all the slops you got slopped into your slop box!
Grammarly was a great idea in the pre-AI era. Now I bet they're losing a lot with so many AI solutions that are better integrated across every ecosystem.
Some people will argue that Grammarly still has a better suggestion system, but models have become increasingly good at writing. I think this product and its revenue model will become obsolete pretty soon.
> but models have become increasingly good at writing.
That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.
I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.
HN readers are not average people. elsewhere i see people using AI to write without any blowback. maybe they don't want to ruffle feathers, but they are engaging, whereas i prefer to just skip over AI generated posts.
What about just labeling you silently as useless? How do you know that this doesn't happen?
this. My not-at-all technical partner often comments to me that whatever youtuber is reading from an ai script and just turns off whatever we're watching. I assume similar happens in other areas.
For her its rarely the specific tells ("not-x-but-y" etc) but rather its bad metaphors and analogies that get her.
Most people don't care what the other person thinks about their email so long as their boss thinks they are doing their job (and their boss is usually the one paying/telling them to use AI) and the other side responds. Should they? Probably, but everyone should probably do a lot of things we don't.
I feel a tinge when I see an AI written email that is longer than it needs to be/boring to read but I still need to engage whatever it was they were emailing about anyways.
that's what i do, but the posts still get engagement, and it's the same level of engagement as the non-AI posts by the same people, which tells me they are not put off by the AI-writing.
Not my experience at all on non-technical online spaces. For example, people try posting AI garbage on sports message boards and everyone dunks on them for posting slop.
These spaces are filled with people barely technically literate enough to post and AI is still viewed very negatively
If you build a nice writing guideline, you can impersonate Mark Twain if you want with any model.
They are losing because they embraced AI at the detriment of what they where doing well.
It was a good tool, that worked, paid for it for a couple of months and then they decided to go with AI and using my writing for training.
I suspect they're also losing a lot of university subscriptions after they started advertising how they offer a service to make LLM-written text look human-written, if I recall correctly they even explicitly advertised that you could use it to cheat. I don't know what they were thinking with that marketing campaign given that universities are probably one of their biggest market segments.
> pre-AI era
That is a very bad shortening for "pre-laymen-take-of-AI". Let us try to keep language clean at least here.
If the product in question replaces a tutor, it is AI ("simulation of intelligence"). We cannot restrict the term "AI" to "giving a broader appearance of intelligence with less trust in the results". Either this is still the "AI era" (post cybernetics, post Dartmouth), or we are not there yet.
pre-slop era might be a fitting term
Grammarlynis using AI.
Models are not good at writing. Like, they are just not producing good writings. They produce differently bad writing.
What are the alternative AI solutions?
All the LLMs. Both commercial and open. If you know how to setup the style, rules, you can outmatch any Grammarly setting.
For those in Europe, this kind of behaviour usually is taken care by consumer protection agencies, fill in a complaint /report them, in you jurisdiction.
Unless you're in country A and ordered from country B (both in Europe), in which case the consumer protection agency from country A may just tell you "well they're not in our country so we can't do much, try contacting the European consumer agency, which after spending 30 minutes finding their form, and checking that you do qualify (which you won't, for some stupid reason like "did you try calling them nicely and sending a letter and waiting for 30 days?"), they will just say "ok cool we sent them an e-mail, we'll tell you how all of this will work out".
Or maybe I'm just in a bad European country who pulls this kind of demotivating stints every time I have this kind of problem.
Sure, I don't say it is easy, it is also a matter of perseverance, in most cases.
I've tried it, a dozen times, in two European countries with, on paper, strong data protection laws. Every single time, after anemic back-and-forth, the national data protection agency basically told me "they say it's fine and you opted in, nothing we can do".
Sometimes you really hit a dead end. Some orgs just don't respond, or say they don't have the resources to process your complaint, or lie. The codified consumer protection laws are nice, in principle. Multinationals know they can get away with pretty much anything.
Fair. The agencies are one tool, but the payment intermediary is usually the one that actually moves - a chargeback often does more than an ECC complaint ever will
Damn it feels good to be an American eagle sounds
I tried to report Linkedin for their practices and it was like spitting at the sky trying to hit God
Consumer protection applies to individual consumers, not businesses. OP looks like a business.
Yes - unfortunately this looks to be completely irrelevant to consumer protection.
"A contractor of my employer asked me to contact another member of my organisation to persuade them to do something commercially advantageous for them" - at no point is anyone here a consumer.
Business emails are subject to fairly different rules by the looks of it: https://tietosuoja.fi/en/faq-direct-marketing ("Can a person working in a company be sent direct electronic marketing") - it appears there's a fair bit of an exception that doesn't require consent.
Here in Australia unless that particular user that received the emails gave consent to receive marketing emails (and the emails have identification + unsubscribe) it would be violating our Spam act.
https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2024-07/guide/consumer-...
What happens if it gets ignored? I get blasted with email drips everywhere I sign up.
The principle here, for anyone confused, is that a consumer has very weak negotiating power against a business and therefore needs basic rights, but when two businesses negotiate, it's a level playing field and if they wanted those rights they would've been easily able to get them.
According to https://superhuman.com/legal/dpa they claim that their role is processor. Processor is only allowed to use personal data they obtained from controller under controller's documented instructions. Unless those included authorization to send such an email to controller's users it's quite likely that they exceeded those. GDPR-wise (and likely that DPA-wise) that is a breach on it's own.
What are you going to report? There’s nothing illegal going on here.
Bad business practices, this sometimes also ends up in the agency reaching out to the related companies.
Or having their names listed in industry reports, which their marketing departments usually don't like.
In the UK that would be trading standards, and unless it's a local shop selling un-taxed cigarettes they're useless.
Good luck actually getting them to do something. Also "Europe" is an entire continent with many different countries and laws, you might want to be more specific.
I reported a brand of baby formula that made our kid very sick, in light of the contamination of fish oil. Not even a week later they had gone to the shop and tested the batch.
Cynicism about public institutions is overrated.
Gee, I wonder what the difference between "dangerous killer baby formula" and "marketing tactic I don't like" is
The difference isn’t nil, but the point is that these institutions can be quite effective.
I’ve reported issues to the DPA (Data Protection Agency) of Belgium and they handled it reasonably well, which I didn’t expect either.
Marketing tactics are part of consumer issues and many countries seem to have good consumer protection laws. Of course Grammarly’s issue was towards/against a business, and that colours the problem. I think the damage to their reputation is enough punishment, but there might be other ways to tackle this.
I merely fail to see the point of “oh well, the Humanity, what can we do”. Apathy is death.
I added "in you jurisdiction" on purpose.
Lmao no. First press games are a scammer company based in Germany. I reported them to the Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband...nothing.
I reported them to the UKICC and got a reply after like 7 months asking for more information (I'd given them plenty) and that they were very busy and it would probably take another year to look at it. I told them not to bother.
I have a different experience, Verbraucherzentrale has helped me putting Vodafone on their place regarding a phone contract that seemed almost impossible to cancel.
Grammarly is a keylogger and an asset of a spying agency[1]. No one should use them either willingly or unwillingly.
[1] almost every cloud solution that exfiltrates your data to the cloud is, but that is besides the point
You can use Grammarly via an API, or simply submit text in a web interface.
It's a keylogger in the same way Vim is a keylogger.
Displaying a full page warning in an app where grammarly is just an integration is... not a good look.
Doesn't appear to be what's happening though.
> We let them know we weren't going to renew and they sent these unsolicited emails and popups in their app to all of the users who had licenses
Not "our app".
I abhor when SaaS products attempt this. I see crap all the time in ClickUp (a particularly horrible product) trying to get me to request access to something no in our plan. It's so clearly trying to drum up (nearly)fake support for wanting a feature. They try to be innocuous but I find it incredibly disrespectful when a SaaS is littered with "Upgrade" or "Bug your manager to upgrade" buttons/CTAs.
See also the persistent "Upgrade" button in my Google Mail (Workspace) UI trying to get me to upgrade to a higher plan level.
You know it's bad when you make your user switch to Microsoft faster.
Makes me nostalgic, what a saver this tool has been throughout my time. Never in the world did I believe that my spelling mistakes would in the future be seen as authentic.
PS. Grammarly is like the duolingo owl
I never liked grammarly. It feels like spam.
It's a keylogger.
Google docs is a keylogger.
Only within the web page that's running it. Grammarly is often installed to the system and slurps up whatever it can, even when you haven't explicitly told it to. I think this was the article that illustrated its untrustworthiness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30470457
Their whole operation seems like some sort of five-eyes information proboscis. If AI is putting them out of business, good.
They are an AI business, just a more focused one. The creepy information gathering, the way it blandifies output and encourages reliance over building communication and language skills, it's all the same problems frontier companies have writ small. Their lunch is being eaten by bigger fish and they're shamelessly trying to remain relevant. This will not result in any less spying or bad behavior.
I work at a company that we jokingly call a "SaaS Paradise", since nothing is built in house, and when it is, it's crap. All these companies do the same thing with the popups, e-mails, Slack messages (!) warning of cancellation or change of terms. It looks like collective desperation that is just accelerating post-LLM.
I'm more surprised that anyone was still using grammarly in the first place.
I have a rule, if I hear an advert that I didn't search for on any video site, I say "fuck off <company name>" to ensure I form a negative association with the brand. I've definitely heard "grammarly" far too many times to ever spend a penny on them.
Sad to see this. We had student licenses at our university for writing theses and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even as an (ex)native speaker. Felt more like working with an editor than the “helpful coworker” vibe of current AI tools.
Never understood their browser integration though, ugh. Scanning private messages was already a bad look, I shouldn’t be surprised…
Grammarly's business model is no longer applicable when people already pay for a LLM sub.
This is extreme short sightedness.
We have no proof but it feels like someone asked Claude how to reduce churn and picked an option.
I guess consumers are going to have to “push back” often in the near future.
Slack notifies all admins of a workspace if a payment failed :)
But then it's only admins, not all users, and it may make sense in case the workspace owner is distracted/incapacitated etc.
What ruins the "we care about your workspace" part though is how the message is phrased as a threat. Fail to pay and you'll lose acces to this and that and that other thing...
Slack tries to sell to employees as well though, there are feature CTAs I see all the time trying to get me to express interest so they can tell the admin/owner of the account "Your employees want this feature, pay us more money".
I find it incredibly disrespectful.
I took Grammarly's side, since we used a few SaaS and the CFO (small company for context) revoked access and we had to beg him. Reading the comments about multiple SaaS annoying end users changed my mind.
I don't see a problem with this. B2B2C is a tricky dance with many stakeholders whose business needs are often ignored. If procurement cancels a service that users need without telling the users, which they have been known to do, that's a big problem.
Counterpoint: don’t spam my users or I’ll cut off contact at the network level and block your app from running on our laptops.
Sounds a bit disproportionate. If you do that, you better hope the vendor's CEO and your company's CEO are not golfing buddies.
And in my mind, one email alert or pop-up to all current users letting them know the service is going away (in case they had not been told which is as I've said before often the case in large orgs) is very far from the definition of spam.
Conversely, I would not work for a CEO who would block me from doing my job duties. I'm hired to do a job. If I can't do that job, there's no point in being here. Other companies will pay me for my judgment.
If this happened in real life, I'd say "Joe," (because I'm on a first-name basis with the CEO and chat with him daily), "we had to block communications from Tom's company because they're pulling some bonkers stuff. You might let him know that he's pissing off customers right and left and needs to knock it off."
And yes, this is 100% the definition of spam. It's literally unsolicited commercial communication. Sending these mass instructions to flood the local IT admins is an enormous breech of trust.
They must be desperate
Same vibes as ‘Tell your parents “I want to go to Mt. Splashmore”’
So does anybody actually have a good alternative to Grammarly?
It depends on what you mean by “good alternative”.
We use a self-hosted OSS LanguageTool server that's containerized and runs in a private, on-prem cluster to provide good performance and be HA, but it only works on our corporate network or when using a VPN connection while roaming/remote.
It's incredibly reliable.
It's also devoid of AI/LLM bullshit for writing. Spelling and grammar rules, a few notes about long sentences, that's it.
However, LanguageTool nerfs their other plugins (like mail plugins) to require a subscription service.
I've pleaded with them for years to please allow me to pay a subscription price but use our internal server simply because we don't want/need a spelling/grammar tool to send content to the cloud.
We don't want free. We want private.
The odd thing is that the official LanguageTool browser plugins DO allow use of a self-hosted LanguageTool server; clearly it's doable. There's a poorly maintained obsidian plugin that also works(ish). But that's about it.
We live with these limitations.
Grammarly itself is basically a closed-source version of LanguageTool https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool
Properly funded public education.
A properly funded education works only if you pair it with writing practice and continued correction of grammatical errors that creep in as you develop writing habits. A properly funded education doesn't fix grammatical errors caused by language-processing deficits. Tools like Grammarly give the language-deficient writer more confidence and willingness to write. To me, they are as essential as a spell checker.
A properly funded public education doesn't cover speech-recognition-driven errors. I've talked about this before, but when you write using speech recognition, you need to shift from speaking spoken speech to speaking written speech.
Spoken speech is very sloppy with grammar. We forgive a tremendous amount of detail, forgive a lot of errors because we're focused on what they are saying, not how they are saying it. Grammarly also catches speech-recognition errors.
The usual retort is that one should spend more energy on proofreading your writing; many speech recognition users come to understand that your brain sees what you said, not what's on the page. The fix is to stick your writing in a drawer long enough to forget what you wrote, which isn't a great plan when you need an email in 5 minutes.
So, if not Grammarly, what?
LanguageTool
Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now, and I'll see how well it works over the following days, but assuming it works right for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and go to this package (assuming it's a saner company).
Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, as I thought Grammarly did improve my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.
I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.
---- Below is the above corrected by grammarly
Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now and will see how well it works over the next few days, but if it works for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and switch to this package (assuming it's a saner company).
Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, since I thought Grammarly improved my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.
I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.
[Edit: Corrected a sentence that was missed by both Grammarly and LanguageTool. See if you can figure out which one it was]
This very shortsighted opinion. Because:
1. Not remotely everyone properly educated will be able to write properly due to personal/health traits
2. Not remotely everyone speaks English as a native tongue
3. Most people in the world speak languages of a different family (and grammar) than English
I have a grammar book, and my old AP style guide from college on my desk to ward off the evil spirits of spyware add-ons.
i wonder how much of this is a consequence of AI...
Most analytics tools have the ability to create segments (for example, you could create a group of users who are part of an account that is not going to renew their plan).
And then they have the ability to send emails and notifications to users in a segment.
I wonder how much companies are running agents with access to their analytics tools, and letting them build their own campaigns.
I asked ChatGPT to design a campaign to reduce churn for a SaaS like Grammarly, and it came up with a very similar idea.
Just wait until the emails threaten to reveal all the compromising messages that users unwittingly sent to Grammarly's servers ...
That is ... bold.
I'm surprised people get worked up about this. I've felt like folks have learned to tolerate much worse and manipulative behavior from companies in the last two decades of personal computing... Not that I like it. I believed that society kind of accepted dystopia. Is it just that people are more sensitive because this happened in a corporate setting?
Tolerate due to lack of choice != accept, enjoy, do not try to avoid, do not have homicidal thoughts
Grammarly is a keylogger. Good riddance.
Scummy business uses scummy tactics. I am not surprised.
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ngl respect the hustle ig. Maybe there's some dude in the company that uses grammarly everyday that leadership could otherwise care less about..
But why are we giving sys admins grammarly lmao
It's in the sysadmin sub because we are routinely the people told buy and manage Grammarly deployments, and we're the people generally cancelling those services now given everyone is being pushed to use their flavor of AI instead. And those emails from users upset that we're doing what management told us to do (following this Grammarly advice)? They go from end users to sysadmins.
Doesn't look that unhinged to me.
An in-app notification saying 'your access ends on X date and here is who you should contact if that isn't what you want' is exactly what I'd expect.
I think "unhinged" is a ridiculous word for it. They aren't crazy.
"Outrageous" is better. This will work on a lot of people, and they really will email their managers, because they're sheep. But it won't actually change the managers' minds for the positive. If I got wind of a plot like this against my decision, it would absolutely convince me to stay the course.
If the employees want to complain, I'll listen. If they're encouraged to complain, forget it.
They also send an email with a template to send to the IT department
and namedropped the procurement person
Lmao sucks that it had to be the IT dept
The thing that didn't happen does sounds reasonable.