>Writing tool Grammarly has disabled an AI feature which mimicked personas of prominent writers, including Stephen King and scientist Carl Sagan, following a backlash from people impersonated.
>The Expert Review function, which offered writing feedback “inspired by” the styles of famous authors and academics, was taken down this week by Superhuman, the tech firm which runs Grammarly.
>The feature was met with resistance, including a multi-million dollar lawsuit, from writers who found their names and reputations used as “AI personas” without their consent.
>Shishir Mehrotra, the firm’s chief executive, apologised on LinkedIn, acknowledging the tool had “misrepresented” the voices of experts.
CtrlAltDelight495 on
It feels like such an embarrassing judgement call to blatantly try to profit off famous authors and editors without their consent. Hopefully lawsuits like this act as a deterrent but it doesn’t solve the problem for LLMs that have been trained on authors voices already and don’t even give credit or acknowledge it.
celtic1888 on
Please sue these fuckers back into the Wang Computer Era
obert-wan-kenobert on
“‘Ayuh,’ he said, standing in his blue chambray work-shirt beneath the arc-sodium street lamps.”
RichardDick69 on
I wonder how grammarly feels about people pirating their software. Because that’s basically what they’re doing to these authors by stealing their voices to sell a product. I bet they don’t like when it gets done to them despite being fine with doing it to others.
nionvox on
Whomever signed off on that has probably tanked their job. You could see the liability of this from 50 miles off, c’mon.
6 Comments
>Writing tool Grammarly has disabled an AI feature which mimicked personas of prominent writers, including Stephen King and scientist Carl Sagan, following a backlash from people impersonated.
>The Expert Review function, which offered writing feedback “inspired by” the styles of famous authors and academics, was taken down this week by Superhuman, the tech firm which runs Grammarly.
>The feature was met with resistance, including a multi-million dollar lawsuit, from writers who found their names and reputations used as “AI personas” without their consent.
>Shishir Mehrotra, the firm’s chief executive, apologised on LinkedIn, acknowledging the tool had “misrepresented” the voices of experts.
It feels like such an embarrassing judgement call to blatantly try to profit off famous authors and editors without their consent. Hopefully lawsuits like this act as a deterrent but it doesn’t solve the problem for LLMs that have been trained on authors voices already and don’t even give credit or acknowledge it.
Please sue these fuckers back into the Wang Computer Era
“‘Ayuh,’ he said, standing in his blue chambray work-shirt beneath the arc-sodium street lamps.”
I wonder how grammarly feels about people pirating their software. Because that’s basically what they’re doing to these authors by stealing their voices to sell a product. I bet they don’t like when it gets done to them despite being fine with doing it to others.
Whomever signed off on that has probably tanked their job. You could see the liability of this from 50 miles off, c’mon.