Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel

I loved Grammarly. But it has changed post LLM boom. The underlying concept was awesome as they take grammatical rules from a book of english grammar rules into a linter. Then it let you select the tone and adjusted some for marketing/engagement so it sounds good on Twitter. I have severe dyslexia and struggled with tone.

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.

I think Grammarly is quite obviously in trouble since LLMs went so mainstream. And while I think AI-powered replacements are a great threat, I reckon an even bigger one is the decline of writing itself.

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?

Grammarly was a great idea in the pre-AI era. Now I bet they're losing a lot with so many AI solutions that are better integrated across every ecosystem.

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.

For those in Europe, this kind of behaviour usually is taken care by consumer protection agencies, fill in a complaint /report them, in you jurisdiction.

Displaying a full page warning in an app where grammarly is just an integration is... not a good look.

You know it's bad when you make your user switch to Microsoft faster.

Slack notifies all admins of a workspace if a payment failed :)

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...

Grammarly is a keylogger and an asset of a spying agency[1]. No one should use them either willingly or unwillingly.

[1] almost every cloud solution that exfiltrates your data to the cloud is, but that is besides the point

Sad to see this. We had student licenses at our university for writing theses and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even as an (ex)native speaker. Felt more like working with an editor than the “helpful coworker” vibe of current AI tools.

Never understood their browser integration though, ugh. Scanning private messages was already a bad look, I shouldn’t be surprised…

I never liked grammarly. It feels like spam.

This is extreme short sightedness.

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.

i wonder how much of this is a consequence of AI...

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.

They must be desperate

I'm more surprised that anyone was still using grammarly in the first place.

I don't see a problem with this. B2B2C is a tricky dance with many stakeholders whose business needs are often ignored. If procurement cancels a service that users need without telling the users, which they have been known to do, that's a big problem.

Scummy business uses scummy tactics. I am not surprised.

Their whole operation seems like some sort of five-eyes information proboscis. If AI is putting them out of business, good.

That is ... bold.

Just wait until the emails threaten to reveal all the compromising messages that users unwittingly sent to Grammarly's servers ...

ngl respect the hustle ig. Maybe there's some dude in the company that uses grammarly everyday that leadership could otherwise care less about..

But why are we giving sys admins grammarly lmao

> Grammarly was founded in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2009 by Ukrainians Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider, and it still maintains a major office in Kyiv alongside its international headquarters

Part of the reason.

Later edit: Meaning some of the people from that part of the world have become accustomed with this type of behaviour knowing full-well that there will be no repercussions, to the contrary, it wouldn't surprise me to read that canceling a contract with Grammarly means giving in to the Russians.

Grammarly is a keylogger. Good riddance.

Doesn't look that unhinged to me.

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.