If you’re one of many users who trust Grammarly to check your online communication, you might be thrilled to note that the grammar-checking app is about to get more comprehensive. The newly announced features use artificial intelligence (of course they do) to handle more of your writing workload than just ensuring you sound like you completed high school in your office emails.
The app’s new AI functions are paired with a new tool called Grammarly Docs, which promises to “build on your writing, voice, and ideas” via a combination of AI chat and the service’s new agents. The service reckons this is the best thing since humans worked out how to fix the dangling participle.
“He crossed the room Grammarly.”
The company is dropping its series of new tools on both its free and paid users, though its AI Checker and Plagiarism Checker functions are reserved for Grammarly Pro users. The others, which seem like evolutions of what the app has done all along, are up for grabs.
These include Proofreader, which does exactly what it says. It’ll offer “in-line suggestions for improved clarity and confidence while providing feedback tailored to the user’s writing style and audience.” Paraphraser was also named by Captain Obvious™ and “adapts writing to fit an intended tone, audience, and style.”
Other functions predict reader reactions and offer suggestions for clarity and avoiding open questions, or suggest expert opinions on what is being written in terms of content. Another, called AI Grader, is intended for those in the education system. It predicts what a given grade might be for a specific piece of work, with suggestions for increasing that number.
The Citation Finder function sounds the most useful, but it has the most potential for mucking up your work. It “delivers relevant evidence that supports, disputes, or refutes claims in a piece of writing and automatically generates correctly formatted citations.” If users don’t check the Citation Finder’s citations, they could well wind up confidently using hallucinated (but perfectly cited) information.
On one hand, extensive AI assistance is handy for Grammarly end-users, but there are risks involved in relying on the app. Several studies suggest that overreliance on AI has consequences for users beyond shortening workflows. Even extended usage of Grammarly’s non-AI suggestions can lead to atrophy of writing skills. Letting the app take even more of the reins might amplify that tendency over a relatively short period.
