Superhuman, the tech company behind the writing software Grammarly, is facing a class action lawsuit over an AI tool that presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—none of whom consented to have their names appear within the product.
Julia Angwin, an award-winning investigative journalist who founded The Markup, a nonprofit news organization that covers the impact of technology on society, is the only named plaintiff in the suit, which does not call for a specific amount in damages but argues that damages across the plaintiff class are in excess of $5 million. She was among the many individuals, alongside Stephen King and Neil deGrasse Tyson, offered up via Grammarly’s “Expert Review” tool as a kind of virtual editor for users.
The federal suit, filed Wednesday afternoon in the Southern District of New York, states that Angwin, on behalf of herself and others similarly situated, “challenges Grammarly’s misappropriation of the names and identities of hundreds of journalists, authors, writers, and editors to earn profits for Grammarly and its owner, Superhuman.”
The complaint comes as Superhuman has already decided to discontinue the feature amid significant public backlash. “After careful consideration, we have decided to disable Expert Review as we reimagine the feature to make it more useful for users, while giving experts real control over how they want to be represented—or not represented at all,” said Ailian Gan, Superhuman’s director for product management, in a statement to WIRED shortly before the claim was filed. “We built the agent to help users tap into the insights of thought leaders and experts and to give experts new ways to share their knowledge and reach new audiences. Based on the feedback we’ve received, we clearly missed the mark. We are sorry and will do things differently going forward.”
As WIRED reported earlier this month, Superhuman last year added a suite of AI-powered widgets to the platform, including one that purported to have a veteran writer (living or dead) weigh in with a critique of the user’s text. While a disclaimer clarified that none of the people cited had endorsed or directly participated in the development of this tool, which leveraged an underlying large language model, various writers, including WIRED journalists, expressed frustration over Grammarly invoking their likenesses and apparently regurgitating their life’s work with these AI agents.
Angwin’s attorney Peter Romer-Friedman says that longstanding laws in New York and California, where Superhuman is based, clearly prohibit the commercial use of a person’s name and likeness without their permission. “Legally, we think it’s a pretty straightforward case,” he tells WIRED. “More broadly, one of the reasons why we’re filing this case is, you know, we can see what’s happening in our society: that lots of professionals who spend years, or in Julia’s case, decades, honing a skill or a trade, then see that their name or their skills are being appropriated by others without their consent.”
As a New York Times opinion writer, Angwin has written extensively about how Silicon Valley giants have eroded privacy in the 21st century.
“Contrary to the apparent belief of some tech companies, it is unlawful to appropriate peoples’ names and identities for commercial purposes, whether those people are famous or not,” the lawsuit states. “Through this action, Ms. Angwin seeks to stop Grammarly and its owner, Superhuman, from trading on her name and those of hundreds of other journalists, authors, editors, and even lawyers, and to stop Grammarly from attributing words to them that they never uttered and advice that they never gave.”
Angwin tells WIRED that when she learned of Grammarly’s use of her name and reputation from the tech newsletter Platformer, she was surprised to have been cloned, so to speak. “You know, deepfakes are something I always think celebrities are getting caught up in, not regular journalists,” she says. “I was just like, are you kidding me?”
Angwin took further offense at the advice that her digital doppelgänger was dispensing. “It wasn’t even just anodyne,” she says. “It was actually kind of actively making it worse.” In one example, Angwin says, Grammarly’s version of her suggested that a simple sentence be revised to be longer and more complex in a way that “actually made it harder to understand.” In another case, it advised the user to expand on a theme that was not actually pertinent to the text.
“It felt very scattershot to me,” Angwin says. “I was surprised at how bad it was.”
Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra separately posted about the decision to discontinue “expert review” on LinkedIn on Wednesday. “Over the past week, we received valid critical feedback from experts who are concerned that the agent misrepresented their voices,” Mehrotra wrote. “This kind of scrutiny improves our products, and we take it seriously.”
Superhuman did not immediately comment on Angwin’s lawsuit.
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