Grammarly kills Expert Review AI, faces class action
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- Grammarly quietly launched "Expert Review" in August 2025, an AI feature that generated writing suggestions and attributed them to named experts like Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, later confirmed to include deceased professors and Verge staffers including Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Tom Warren, and Sean Hollister without their knowledge.
- The Verge reported on March 4 that the feature was fabricating attributions to real people, and follow-up testing found that the feature's "source" links were frequently broken or redirected to unrelated articles, including paywalled Verge stories copied onto web archiving sites.
- Grammarly initially responded on March 10 by launching an opt-out email inbox for affected experts, then reversed course the next day and announced it would disable Expert Review entirely following public backlash, including angry LinkedIn comments on CEO Shishir Mehrotra's apology post.
- Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra acknowledged on LinkedIn that the company "fell short," and on The Verge's Decoder podcast called Expert Review a "bad" and "buried" feature, repeatedly arguing the practice constituted "attribution" of publicly available work rather than use of likenesses — a framing Nilay Patel directly disputed on the show.
- Investigative journalist Julia Angwin filed a class action lawsuit against Superhuman the same day Expert Review was disabled, alleging violations of privacy and publicity rights and likeness protection laws in New York and California on behalf of herself and other named individuals.
- Mehrotra hinted the feature could return in a reimagined form where experts "choose to participate" and "control how their knowledge is represented," suggesting this opt-in model could become part of a broader AI creator economy.
Why it matters: The lawsuit exposes real legal exposure for AI companies that scrape public expertise and attach real names to machine-generated output — a practice Superhuman's own CEO initially defended as mere "attribution" but that plaintiffs argue crosses into likeness-misappropriation territory. With Expert Review generating AI tips under Stephen King's name and charging paying subscribers for the privilege, the case could set a precedent for how consent and compensation work when AI products monetize recognizable identities.
