An open letter to Grammarly and other plagiarists, thieves and slop merchants

To everyone at Grammarly,

I am writing a book right now, a really challenging endeavor that no doubt someone in Silicon Valley will think it’s fine to steal the day it’s published. I’ve been a professional writer for decades, even though the number of ways to make money from writing has gone down. I keep going because I love it — I love the challenge of making prose sing, of weaving many interviews into a fascinating chronicle. 

But it’s hard. So many talented people I know are losing their jobs, making too little money, and turning to other professions to pay their bills. Everything that you are engaged in as a company is part of that. If you don’t believe that, you’re being willfully obtuse. 

The number of ways in which firms like yours disrespect writers and other creative people are endless. And you require us — the people harmed — to put brakes on the harmful things YOU are doing, not just to us but to entire creative professions. The latest idiocy is your attempt to steal people’s identities and use individuals — including me — as your expert reviewers of writing.  

Have you ever been in a schoolroom with young children? Have you ever raised young children yourself? If so, you know they are taught not to hit or hurt other bodies, and not to verbally or in any other way hurt or steal from others. These are basic things children learn at a very young age. You do not get to say that you don’t understand these very basic issues of autonomy, respect and self-control. You. Do. Not. 

I do not want to hear even the slightest amount of bullshit about how you didn’t need to ask for permission to use our names and use our identities in your review function. You just wanted to steal, so you stole. You wanted to take things without permission, so you did. It’s wrong. It’s so enragingly wrong. I hope everyone in the world stops using your service. Because a business built on theft is not a business, it’s a scam. 

I began writing professionally in the early ’90s. I have built a name for myself for decades, at various respected publications and through a best-selling nonfiction book. People know who I am through social media, and through investigative stories, reviews, opinion pieces, features and interviews I’ve published. Who I am, what I stand for, my reputation in multiple arenas — all that took years to build.

You just take that? You just take my identity? And you do that in an environment where making a living from writing is an ever more precarious proposition? And then you make me take time out of my day to tell you that’s wrong? You know that’s wrong. Of course it is. You just do not care.

I am sick to death of this — of the tech industry deciding it can do what it wants without consequences. Everything is a subscription, everything is harder to use and enshittified. Everything is built on something that was stolen or degraded. So-called AI – which is not intelligent at all – is being shoved into everything, and makes nothing better (quite the reverse). “Move fast and break things” now extends to the reputations and identities of respected professionals and creative people. And you have the nerve to presume we should all put up with every outrage, with every act of destruction, with every theft. I don’t. I won’t. 

I don’t condone this. I don’t condone what Grammarly has done, to myself or anyone being touted as an expert on your site. I don’t condone any of these slop machines stealing people’s work without compensation and filling people’s minds with shitty art or crap writing that is full of inaccuracies. 

In the rare cases of LLM theft in which compensation will be made to a subset of creative people, it’ll be far too little, too late. Experienced creative people take months or years to create useful, entertaining or illuminating work, through craft, dedication, joy and painstaking labor. You and companies like yours steal that work, watch entire professions get decimated, and then if anyone protests, you disingenuously say, “Oh golly, well, I guess we’ll take your name off the list of people we’re stealing from.” 

You should all be ashamed. 

You should be ashamed of where you work. Not just Grammarly or Superhuman or whatever comically dumb name you come up with next. Almost everyone running tech firms, most people in positions of responsibility, pretty much every C-suite type — congrats, you’re all making the world a worse place. People used to be excited about tech, now they dread what data you're going to steal next, they dread what violation of privacy or the environment will turn up next. There are people in tech who want to do good, but they’re consistently outvoted or stampeded by selfish hucksters and thieves. What the vast majority of those with power are doing or enabling is shamefully disrespectful and destructive. Everyone hyping and shilling for all this? You shouldn’t be proud of making people dumber or stealing from people. Because LLMs and the whole AI hype machine — it’s just idiocy, plagiarism, greed and theft on a grand scale. 

These plagiarism machines simply regurgitate what has been fed into them. They are not capable of true art, real creativity, the kind of structure, nuance and depth that are the hallmarks of worthy acts of creativity. These slop machines are wrong a lot of the time, they encourage people to do terrible things, and they are simply bad for the world. I feel sad for anyone who uses them, because they’re degrading the human condition — the ability to know and care and understand. All this theft, stupidity and degradation is not only bad and harmful — it's unnecessary. 

Because actual writers and artists and creative folks are right here! All we want is baseline respect and reasonable compensation. But the snake-oil salespeople involved in pushing these the hallucinating plagiarism machines on the rest of us think any compensation is too much! The executives ruining human discourse and the planet – they must be lavishly paid. Actual creators — we get exactly nothing. No money, no respect, no consent. 

And so, from the bottom of my underpaid, deeply creative heart: Fuck you.

You are wrecking the environment so that terrible people who make bad decisions can be enriched. You are destroying entire fields of creativity so that unsuspecting people can get bad information and “advice” from inaccurate, dumbly predictive slop machines. You are degrading the human condition. You are making the world a worse place. 

And now, in addition to all that, now your slop machines use the names of real people (some of them dead)? You steal my friends’ names? Or MY NAME?

I think the fuck not. 

What’s wrong with you? Seriously, what is wrong with you? Why do you want to shit on entire swathes of human endeavor and wreck the planet while you’re doing it? Why are you so determined to be awful and amoral? Everything about your priorities is messed up, and you should all be heartily ashamed, abashed and embarrassed.

Go fuck yourselves. And get my name out of your mouths.  

Sincerely,

Maureen “Mo” Ryan