Grammarly is fighting a class action lawsuit after its AI-powered 'Expert Review' feature impersonated established authors and academics without permission. The writing platform abruptly killed the feature Wednesday, the same day legal papers hit, marking a major escalation in the growing backlash over AI tools cloning real people's voices and expertise. The case could set precedent for how AI companies use personal likeness and professional identity in their products.
Grammarly just became the latest AI company to face serious legal consequences for cloning real people without asking first. The writing assistant platform is now defending itself against a class action lawsuit challenging its 'Expert Review' feature, which presented AI-generated editing suggestions as if they came from established authors, professors, and writing experts—all without getting their permission.
The timing tells the story. Grammarly pulled the plug on Expert Review Wednesday, the exact day the lawsuit landed. That's not a coincidence. The feature had been live for months, offering users the chance to get feedback supposedly styled after recognized writing authorities. Except those authorities never agreed to have their names, reputations, or expertise borrowed by an algorithm.
According to the complaint, Grammarly's AI essentially created synthetic versions of real professionals, training on their work to mimic their editorial voices and then attaching their identities to machine-generated suggestions. Users paid premium prices thinking they were getting insights shaped by actual human experts. Instead, they got AI approximations trading on borrowed credibility.
This isn't just about hurt feelings or attribution disputes. The lawsuit argues Grammarly commercially exploited these individuals' professional reputations without compensation or consent. In the AI age, that's emerging as a crucial legal battleground. Your writing style, your analytical approach, your hard-earned expertise—can a company just feed that into a model and sell it back to customers under your name?
