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Comment by chilipepperhott | Hacker News Reader

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chilipepperhott·

I know all press is good press... but there are limits.

If it feels like Grammarly does not respect your right to digital sovereignty, it is because it does not.

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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.

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

It seems like there are many apps that can be run locally that use LLMs. Although I haven't used this, I found it on reddit and it's made by a student. https://github.com/theJayTea/WritingTools

Seems like there could be others that are better.

I believe the person you're replying to meant local inferencing. The tool you shared, like most (all?) LLM utilities, is wrapping API calls.

https://github.com/theJayTea/WritingTools/blob/main/Windows_...

IIRC, I think the core of Grammarly is a CL-based pattern-matching system, so it may be even simpler than that.

The real issue seems more about transparency and consent around how the models are trained and how author personas are being used

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