Grammarly is being accused of “necromancy” after users discovered a feature for reviewing manuscripts with AI versions of real professors — some of whom have already left this mortal coil.
The issue was first flagged by Verena Krebs, a medieval historian and Ruhr-University Bochum professor. On Sunday, Krebs shared a screenshot showing the “Expert Review” tool allowing users to pick historian David Abulafia as one of the available “experts” to check their paper. If Abulafia objected to his inclusion here, we’ll probably never know, since he died in January.
The news sparked a flurry of fiery responses across academic circles.
“Grammarly is now offering ‘expert review’ of your work by living and dead academics,” Vanessa Heggie, an associate professor in the history of science and medicine at the University of Birmingham, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Without anyone’s explicit permission it’s creating little LLMs based on their scraped work and using their names and reputation.”
“I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the most cursed,” Claire E. Aubin, a historian and host of the “This Guy Sucked” podcast, wrote in a now viral post on Bluesky.
Grammarly describes “Expert Review” as an AI agent that can help you “meet the expectations of your discipline and your project by drawing on insights from subject-matter experts and trusted publications,” which comes packed with Grammarly’s suite of new AI tools it released last summer. To use it, you open your document in Grammarly’s AI platform, select the Expert Review agent, and let it make suggestions based on your expert of choice. The tool will even generate revised versions of your writing based on the suggestions being made.
“Revise the draft yourself or let Expert Review rework things for you,” Grammarly’s website claims.
The tool already feels invasive for essentially impersonating real academics by providing AI-generated feedback under their name, to say nothing of the flouting of copyright protections that every LLM in existence relied on to be built. That it’s also masquerading as dead professors, in the eyes of many scholars, adds grievous insult to injury.
This is “literally digital necromancy,” wrote Kathleen Alves, an associate professor of English at CUNY, in a Bluesky post.
“NecromancerLLM,” echoed Hisham Zerriffi, an associate professor in forest resources management at the University of British Columbia. “Seriously, dead or alive, this is just wrong.”
This isn’t the only AI tool from Grammarly that will pose as a real pedagogue. It also provides an “AI grader agent” that provides students with personalized feedback on their homework by looking up “publicly available instructor information” on their teachers and professors.
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