Grammarly is being accused of “necromancy” after users discovered a feature to review manuscripts with AI versions of real professors — some of whom have already left this mortal coil.
The issue was first raised by the medieval historian and Ruhr-University Bochum professor Verena Krebs. On Sunday, Crabs shared a screenshot Showing the “Expert Review” tool allows users to select historian David Abulafia as one of the available “experts” to examine their paper. If Abulafia objected to his inclusion here, we will probably never know, as he died in January.
The news sparked furious reactions in academic circles.
“Grammarly is now offering ‘expert reviews’ of your work by academics living and dead,” said Vanessa Heggie, 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 is creating small LLMs based on their scraped work and using their name and reputation.”
“I’ve seen a lot of cursed things in my time as an academic, but this is one of the most cursed things,” said Claire E. Aubin, historian and host of the “This Guy Sucked” podcast. Wrote in the post now going viral 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 insights from subject-matter experts and trusted publications,” which comes with Grammarly’s suite of new AI tools released last summer. To use it, you open your document in Grammarly’s AI platform, select an expert review agent, and let it make suggestions based on the expert of your choice. This tool will also create revised versions of your writing based on the suggestions you provide.
Grammarly’s website claims, “Revise the draft yourself or let expert review rework things for you.”
This tool already seems offensive for essentially impersonating real academics by providing AI-generated feedback under its own name, to say nothing of the violation of copyright protections that underpins the creation of every LLM in existence. In the eyes of many scholars, it is also a mask of dead professors, which adds serious insult to injury.
It is “virtually digital necromancy,” Kathleen Alves, associate professor of English at CUNY, wrote in an article. bluesky post.
“NecromancerLLM,” echoing Hisham Zerifi, an associate professor in forest resource management at the University of British Columbia. “Frankly, dead or alive, this is just wrong.”
This isn’t the only AI tool from Grammarly that will pose as a real teacher. It also offers an “AI grader agent” that provides students with personalized feedback on their homework by looking at “publicly available instructor information” on their teachers and professors.
More on AI: New AI agent logs directly into college platform Canvas to do your homework for you
