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Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

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Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#101

Post by contagiousflow »

bonoboTP wrote: post #30
beernet wrote: post #8

This feels like a desperate attempt to stay relevant in a post-LLM world. They’re basically wrapping an LLM in a "professional" skin and calling it an expert review. The problem is that once you start letting an AI "expert" dictate tone and logic, you effectively lobotomize the writer’s original intent. We’re reaching a point where AI is just reviewing other AI-generated text, creating a feedback loop of pure mediocr…

It's great. Now that fancy writing is cheap and infinite, fields whose entire scholarship value was in obscurantist jargon bending have to actually start to turn on their brains and care about making more sense than an LLM can.

What fields rely only on jargon manipulation to produce papers?

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#103

Post by abirch »

SoftTalker wrote: post #99
mikeocool wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It almost seems like this whole feature is designed to invite law suits. Seems pretty likely usage of Grammarly's core product has cratered in the past few years. Not totally hard to imagine one of the big AI labs paying their legal fees in exchange for putting this out there and kick starting the legal process on some of these issues.

LLMs basically made Grammarly irrelevant as a product. Why have a tool to correct your grammar when you can just have it write the whole piece for you. And one things LLMs do well is construct grammatically correct text. So IMO they are just flinging things at the wall trying to find a way back.

As Annie Duke said in her book Quit, "quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early." Grammarly was a great in the 2010s, but now it's too easily replaced.

It reminds me of winzip.

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#104

Post by nxobject »

abirch wrote: post #103
SoftTalker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs basically made Grammarly irrelevant as a product. Why have a tool to correct your grammar when you can just have it write the whole piece for you. And one things LLMs do well is construct grammatically correct text. So IMO they are just flinging things at the wall trying to find a way back.

As Annie Duke said in her book Quit, "quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early." Grammarly was a great in the 2010s, but now it's too easily replaced. It reminds me of winzip.

Depressingly enough, if Grammarly does throw in the hat, we'll lose an application of clear utility that could be run entirely locally.

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#105

Post by JCharante »

plewd wrote: post #37
simianwords wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but llm can do both. so what's the point? can you give a specific example of what an llm can't do? be specific so we can test it.

like OP originally said, the LLM doesn't have access to the actual process of the author, only the completed/refined output. Not sure why you need a concrete example to "test", but just think about the fact that the LLM has no idea how a writer brainstorms, re-iterates on their work, or even comes up with the ideas in the first place.

why not? datasets are not only finished works, there's datasets that go into the process they're just available in smaller quantities

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#106

Post by JCharante »

treetalker wrote: post #65
drbig wrote: post #3

The most interesting is the realization that if the LLM's input is only the output of a professional (human), then by definition the LLM cannot mimic the process the (human) professional applied to get from whatever input they had to produce the output. In other words an LLM can spit out a plausible "output of X", however it cannot encode the process that lead X to transform their inputs into their output.

You've pinpointed the connection that people fail to make when they seek legal advice (or even information) from LLMs.

what prevents the input from being keystrokes and screen recordings of thousands of lawyers solving cases?

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#107

Post by Rohansi »

esafak wrote: post #82
Planktonne wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything works like integrals. Some things don't have a standard process that everyone follows the same way. Editing is one of these things. There can be lots of different processes, informed by lots of different things, and getting similar output is no guarantee of a similar process.

The process is irrelevant if the output is the same, because we never observe the process. I assume you are arguing that the outputs are not guaranteed to be the same unless you reproduce the process. If we are talking about human artifacts, you never have reproducibility. The same person will behave differently from one moment to the next, one environment to another. But I assume you will call that natural variation…

It's relevant for data it hasn't been trained on. LLMs are trained to be all-knowing which is great as a utility but that does not come close to capturing an individual.

If I trained (or, more likely, fine-tuned) an LLM to generate code like what's found in an individual's GitHub repositories, could you comfortably say it writes code the same way as that individual? Sure, it will capture style and conventions, but what about our limitations? What do you think happens if you fine-tune a model to write code like a frontend developer and ask it to write a simple operating system kernel? It's realistically not in their (individual) data but the response still depends on the individual's thought process.

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#108

Post by astra1701 »

4nonverbal-alit wrote: post #35
beernet wrote: post #8

This feels like a desperate attempt to stay relevant in a post-LLM world. They’re basically wrapping an LLM in a "professional" skin and calling it an expert review. The problem is that once you start letting an AI "expert" dictate tone and logic, you effectively lobotomize the writer’s original intent. We’re reaching a point where AI is just reviewing other AI-generated text, creating a feedback loop of pure mediocr…

Grammarly even from the start was very distracting to me even as a someone using english as a second language to communicate. I have developed my own taste and way of articulating thoughts, but grammarly (and LLMs today) forced me to remove that layer of personality from my texts which I didn't wanted to let go. Sure I sounded less professional, but that was the image I wanted to project anyways. Unrelated but surpri…

JetBrains’s default grammar checking plugin[1] is actually built on languagetool[2], a pretty decent grammar checker that also happens to be partly open source and self-hostable[3]. Sadly, they have lately shoved in a few (thankfully optional) crappy LLM-based features (that don’t even work well in the first place) and coated their landing page in endless AI keywords, but their core engine is still more traditional and open-source, and hasn’t really seemed to change in years. You can just run it on your own device and point their browser and editor extensions to it.

[1] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12175-natural-languages... [2] https://languagetool.org -- warning: is coated in somewhat-misleading AI keywords [3] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool

Re: Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers

#109

Post by esafak »

Rohansi wrote: post #107
esafak wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The process is irrelevant if the output is the same, because we never observe the process. I assume you are arguing that the outputs are not guaranteed to be the same unless you reproduce the process. If we are talking about human artifacts, you never have reproducibility. The same person will behave differently from one moment to the next, one environment to another. But I assume you will call that natural variation…

It's relevant for data it hasn't been trained on. LLMs are trained to be all-knowing which is great as a utility but that does not come close to capturing an individual. If I trained (or, more likely, fine-tuned) an LLM to generate code like what's found in an individual's GitHub repositories, could you comfortably say it writes code the same way as that individual? Sure, it will capture style and conventions, but wh…

I don't know if LLMs are trained to imitate sources like that. I also don't know what would happen if you asked it to do something like someone who does not know how to do it. Would they refuse, make mistakes, or assume the person can learn? Humans can do all three, so barring more specific instructions any such response is reasonable.
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