Superhuman has taken its writing assistant Grammarly on quite an interesting journey regarding its approach to AI tools. In August, the company launched a feature called Expert Review that will give feedback on your writing, offering AI-generated feedback that appears to come from a renowned author or renowned academic. These recreations were based on “publicly available information from third-party LLMs”, which largely seems to have involved web crawlers of questionable legality.
Suggested experts will be subject matter-based and can range from great scientific minds to bestselling fiction authors to your friendly neighborhood tech bloggers. Whether living or dead, the names of these authors appeared on Grammarly without their permission or knowledge. The company defended in a disclaimer on the service, saying, “References to experts in this product are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.”
As one can imagine, once people took notice, a large number of those authors who were still alive weren’t very happy. In fact, there is already a class action lawsuit underway against Superhuman. The company initially attempted to resolve complaints by allowing authors to exit the platform. I’m sure this was a huge relief to the deceased crew and to those alive who are not following AI news closely and probably still don’t know they are being quoted by the tool.
Today, Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra wrote in a LinkedIn post that the company will disable expert reviews while it reevaluates the feature. “Agent was designed to help users find influential perspectives and scholarship related to their work, while also providing meaningful ways for experts to build deeper relationships with their fans,” he said. Yes, Carl Sagan must have been lamenting the lack of deep relationships with fans later in his life.
Update, March 11, 2026, 5:34 PM ET: This feature was updated to take into account the pending class action lawsuit filed against Superhuman.
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