Back in Feb, when Grammarly said they were going to think about incorporating AI, I immediately canceled my account and uninstalled. And now they've actually done it.
I'm sharing because with everything going on, writers might not realize this is happening.
@susankayequinn
In the early days of Grammarly, I tried it.
It was a nice change from my typo habits. I noticed it was working on every web page, form and document I wrote. After a week or so, it gave statistics, comparing my word choices to "other writers".
I immediately had privacy concerns and deleted and scrubbed it. You are essentially permitting a keylogger onto your device. 🤔 😱
Does it monitor your passwords, your tax forms, your banking?
@susankayequinn
The trouble is, even if you cancel your account, there is no guarantee the company has not already made a covert copy of your writings.
@susankayequinn Haven't had a new book out in a couple years because health, but I always would run Grammarly as my final passthrough for edits, so really glad you posted this because I was going to do it next month 😬
@lyssachiavari Same. It was good at catching typos and some comma/hyphen issues. I'm still using WordRake, which will catch some of that stuff, because I haven't heard of them incorporating AI yet.
@susankayequinn Is there any more reliable info on this than a screenshot of a tweet from a person who calls themselves Cat Rambo?
Not doubting, I'd just like to have a link to that announcement. @catrambo
It isn't recent - from back in 2022. Not familiar enough with Protocol to make comment on its reliability.
The Terms of Service and Privacy Policy leave this open to occur (as part of use of data to provide and improve services) but do not specify if user data becomes AI training data or is just processed by AI.
@susankayequinn Grammarly has always looked dodgy to me, so I never used it. I've looked a bit into LanguageTool instead. In particular, running it locally.
@HistoPol I've never used 365 but when Word pushed their gen-AI "Editor" even into my desktop 2019 version, I started looking for other word processors. Which is tough as a writer because Word is the standard and comment handling is difficult in other software. But I'm making that transition slowly
@kkarhan@susankayequinn grammarly has always been a data harvesting scheme, what else could it be? You give them access to everything you write and in return they correct your comma usage. Honey is another one, you let them track you across the internet and in exchange they occasionally save you 15% on toilet paper.
@susankayequinn Training to make it better is one thing in an effort to make helping everyone else and their content better. They need to train it on something. If they're selling that content, I would take issue with it.
@NatureMC I use WordRake to catch some typographical/grammatical stuff, and I haven't heard of them incorporating AI. I'm not sure if that will serve your purposes or not, but I do like them.
@NatureMC Human editors are much more expensive, and do a much wider range of tasks. I'd say WordRake is only really good for catching some grammatical errors (and not even all of those). I'm not sure what you're using it for (and how often) but all editing takes either time/money and usually both.
@susankayequinn@NatureMC wonder if you paid a human editor now, if they'd use an AI to assist them. You can ultimately view LLMs at tools to augment humans most of the time.
Maybe I misunderstand your post, but how could you not find the privacy policy and the imprint? It's in the footer of the landing page, which is common practice around the world. (See picture attached)
About saving the texts: I assume that this is just for comfort so that you do not lose texts that you only write in the LanguageTool application. If you test the add-ons for Word, Mail, ect., as far as I'm informed they do not store the text then, since you already store the text somewhere locally, so they don't need to provide a backup.
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