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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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…
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 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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
What are the alternative AI solutions?
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".
You know it's bad when you make your user switch to Microsoft faster.
So does anybody actually have a good alternative to Grammarly?
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.
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...
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.
I never liked grammarly. It feels like spam.
It's a keylogger.
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…
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.
Same vibes as ‘Tell your parents “I want to go to Mt. Splashmore”’
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.
They must be desperate
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.
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.
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?
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.
Scummy business uses scummy tactics. I am not surprised.
Just wait until the emails threaten to reveal all the compromising messages that users unwittingly sent to Grammarly's servers ...
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.
Grammarly is a keylogger. Good riddance.
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.