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Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel
(reddit.com)
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by ksec
by ksec
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.
Deepl however - 7-8 or more years ago was bright star - i do not say this lightly but their translation (i can only vouch for german<->english) was out of this world in comparison to everything else like google translate, yahoo or whatever.
It was basically so good - i just kept writing in english even though its not my first language but its easier for technical documentation and i use it to translate back to german instead of doing it the other way around.
But then, when the first mass hysteria of chatgpt 1 etc hits - it good worse fast - nowadays - it can not do any good translation service at all - it is far worse than what the competition offered 7-8 years ago! It makes no sense a lot of times.
Benchmark is very AI-pilled: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-is-replacing-j... and is very bullish on it, too: https://gtmnow.com/benchmark-ai-startup-investing-chetan-put...
it also looks like DeepL went from using a CNN engine to an LLM in 2024 (coinciding with its $2 billion valuation and Series C) which is likely why it seems to hallucinate a lot more now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator#Translation_m...
I need to find an old school grammar checker that works on the command line with markdown.
You might be interested in Val - https://docs.vale.sh/
Even before all that, I switched to Quillbot because Grammarly would always mess up the formatting in my emails in gmail (but only when you viewed it from mobile). Quillbot isn't totally better than that, but at least its cheaper.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[1] almost every cloud solution that exfiltrates your data to the cloud is, but that is besides the point
It's a keylogger in the same way Vim is a keylogger.
> 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".
See also the persistent "Upgrade" button in my Google Mail (Workspace) UI trying to get me to upgrade to a higher plan level.
PS. Grammarly is like the duolingo owl
Never understood their browser integration though, ugh. Scanning private messages was already a bad look, I shouldn’t be surprised…
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.
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...
I find it incredibly disrespectful.
We use a self-hosted OSS LanguageTool server that's containerized and runs in a private, on-prem cluster to provide good performance and be HA, but it only works on our corporate network or when using a VPN connection while roaming/remote.
It's incredibly reliable.
It's also devoid of AI/LLM bullshit for writing. Spelling and grammar rules, a few notes about long sentences, that's it.
However, LanguageTool nerfs their other plugins (like mail plugins) to require a subscription service.
I've pleaded with them for years to please allow me to pay a subscription price but use our internal server simply because we don't want/need a spelling/grammar tool to send content to the cloud.
We don't want free. We want private.
The odd thing is that the official LanguageTool browser plugins DO allow use of a self-hosted LanguageTool server; clearly it's doable. There's a poorly maintained obsidian plugin that also works(ish). But that's about it.
We live with these limitations.
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.
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But why are we giving sys admins grammarly lmao
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.
"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.
For her its rarely the specific tells ("not-x-but-y" etc) but rather its bad metaphors and analogies that get her.
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.
These spaces are filled with people barely technically literate enough to post and AI is still viewed very negatively
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.
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.
Models are not good at writing. Like, they are just not producing good writings. They produce differently bad writing.
"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.
https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2024-07/guide/consumer-...
Or having their names listed in industry reports, which their marketing departments usually don't like.
Cynicism about public institutions is overrated.
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 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.
And in my mind, one email alert or pop-up to all current users letting them know the service is going away (in case they had not been told which is as I've said before often the case in large orgs) is very far from the definition of spam.
If this happened in real life, I'd say "Joe," (because I'm on a first-name basis with the CEO and chat with him daily), "we had to block communications from Tom's company because they're pulling some bonkers stuff. You might let him know that he's pissing off customers right and left and needs to knock it off."
And yes, this is 100% the definition of spam. It's literally unsolicited commercial communication. Sending these mass instructions to flood the local IT admins is an enormous breech of trust.
A properly funded public education doesn't cover speech-recognition-driven errors. I've talked about this before, but when you write using speech recognition, you need to shift from speaking spoken speech to speaking written speech.
Spoken speech is very sloppy with grammar. We forgive a tremendous amount of detail, forgive a lot of errors because we're focused on what they are saying, not how they are saying it. Grammarly also catches speech-recognition errors.
The usual retort is that one should spend more energy on proofreading your writing; many speech recognition users come to understand that your brain sees what you said, not what's on the page. The fix is to stick your writing in a drawer long enough to forget what you wrote, which isn't a great plan when you need an email in 5 minutes.
So, if not Grammarly, what?
Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, as I thought Grammarly did improve my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.
I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.
---- Below is the above corrected by grammarly
Thanks for the reference. I'm trying it out now and will see how well it works over the next few days, but if it works for me, I'll probably ditch my Grammarly subscription and switch to this package (assuming it's a saner company).
Just went through my first corrections, and I think I like it. It isn't as aggressive as Grammarly, and I have mixed feelings about that, since I thought Grammarly improved my writing, clarity, and presentation. It also feels easier to learn by example and reinforce better grammar from the start.
I tried out the AI rewrite, and man, it hits the uncanny valley hard.
[Edit: Corrected a sentence that was missed by both Grammarly and LanguageTool. See if you can figure out which one it was]
1. Not remotely everyone properly educated will be able to write properly due to personal/health traits
2. Not remotely everyone speaks English as a native tongue
3. Most people in the world speak languages of a different family (and grammar) than English
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