Grammarly, Really?

I was watching a YouTube video on cameras, and an advertisement for Grammarly came up. I didn’t manage to catch the text but I googled, and this is a typical Grammarly advertisement.

It features a ‘student’ and a voiceover from Grammarly, and starts with the student speaking aloud to himself:

Student: “Once everything’s perfectly organized, I’ll start working on my thesis.”

Grammarly: “Grammarly will ensure you feel confident nailing your final thesis by supporting your writing journey from start to finish. Welcome to Ideation Station.”

Student: “How do I write the perfect intro paragraph?”

Grammarly: “You start with understanding what makes a perfect intro. Grammarly can highlight precise tips for an introductory paragraph based on the research you’ve done so far.”

Student, in amazement: “An informative and inspiring intro. This is exactly what my thesis needed. Now that I’ve got a strong intro, I need to take a pass at perfecting some of the remaining paragraphs. Revision time?”

Grammarly: “Revision time. Here at Revision Division, we ensure your writing is the highest quality it can be. This paragraph can be simplified. Grammarly can paraphrase this by using the “improve it” prompt, all while maintaining your voice and keeping your work sounding professional.

I highlighted ‘your’ because plainly it is not ‘your’. It is not the student’s work.

Or this one:

As students, we’re constantly evaluated on the quality of our writing, on essays, homework, internship applications.

What I love about Grammarly is that it helps me save my time and my brain power for figuring out what I want to say. I can focus on getting my ideas onto the page and then Grammarly comes in to make sure that those ideas are communicated in a clear and compelling way.

What does that mean that “we’re constantly evaluated on the quality of our writing” – who is the ‘our’ after Grammarly has worked its magic?

Grammarly versus ChatGPT

I wonder whether Grammarly does a better job than just asking ChatGPT to reword a piece of text?

I know – let’s ask ChatGPT to rewrite the previous Grammarly advertisement text in the tone of a game show host making fun of the proceedings?

🎤 “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a big round of applause for Grammarly! That’s right, folks, the magical, brain-saving sidekick you never knew you needed! It swoops in like a superhero, saving you from the soul-crushing burden of… thinking too hard! 🦸‍♂️📝

Why wrestle with grammar or wrestle with your own ideas when Grammarly is here to sprinkle its fairy dust of clarity and make you look like a literary genius? You just throw your half-baked thoughts on the page, and BAM! Grammarly polishes them up like a five-star chef plating a fancy meal. Who knew making sense could be so easy?! Thank you, Grammarly, for doing the heavy lifting while we sit back and pretend we’ve got it all together!” 🎉

I don’t know what Grammarly’s business model is but I imagine that it needs to work really hard to distinguish its product from the AI Large Language Models that can do projects wholesale just from prompts.

If I look deeper into this – what is Grammarly going to produce in the end? If students manage to get through and are let loose in the world – who and what has actually graduated?

It’s scary stuff because there is a disconnect between the unadorned person and the person with the tools they try to sneak past the examiners. And it is definitely ‘sneak past’ because they would not write at the end of their texts ‘Improved by Grammarly’.

What is the next step to stop this – to have students write essays in a public room with invigilators?