What Was Grammarly Thinking?; The Atlantic, March 12, 2026

Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic ; What Was Grammarly Thinking?

A short-lived AI tool promised to help users write like the greats—and a bunch of other random people, including me.

"But in the age of generative AI, there are many new kinds of copying. For instance, Wired reported last week on a tool offered by Grammarly, which briefly offered users the opportunity to put their writing through something called “Expert Review.” This produced AI-generated advice purportedly from the perspective of a bunch of famous authors, a bunch of less-famous working journalists (including myself, per The Verge’s reporting), and a bunch of academics (including some who had recently died).

I say “briefly” because the company deactivated the feature today. A lot of people got really mad about it because none of the experts had agreed for their work to be used in such a way, or to serve as uncompensated marketing for an app that people use to help them write more legible emails. “We hear the feedback and recognize we fell short on this,” the company’s CEO, Shishir Mehrotra, wrote on his LinkedIn page yesterday. Not long after, Wired reported that one of the journalists whose name had been used in the feature, Julia Angwin, was filing a class-action lawsuit against Grammarly’s owner, Superhuman Platform. In a statement forwarded by a spokesperson, Mehrotra repeated apologies made in his LinkedIn post and added, "We have reviewed the lawsuit, and we believe the legal claims are without merit and will strongly defend against them.”...

Now that I’ve looked more closely at this not-very-useful feature, and now that it’s shut down, the whole situation seems a little absurd. This was just a weird and inappropriate thing that a company tried to do to make money without putting in very much effort. The primary reason it became a news story at all was that it touched on widespread anxiety about whose work is worth what, whose skills will continue to be marketable in the age of AI, and whether any of us are really as complex, singular, and impossible-to-imitate as we might hope we are."

Copyright Fair Use: How Much Copying is Too Much Copying?; Lexology, August 15, 2022

Goodell DeVries Leech & Dann LLP - Jim Astrachan, Lexology; Copyright Fair Use: How Much Copying is Too Much Copying?

"...no plagiarist can excuse the wrong by showing how much of his work he did not pirate.” These words were written by Judge Learned Hand in 1936. His point was that a taking of someone else’s expression will not be excused merely because it is insubstantial in quantity when held up for comparison to the infringing work.

Years back a copyright defendant client related copyright lore as a defense to his actions. He swore up and down that copying was permissible as long as not more than 10 percent of the source work was taken. Many times that belief has been mistakenly repeated. Many of the older, bedrock, principles of copyright practice are worth repeating. Perhaps this repetition comes from being the teacher that I suspect is part of my DNA.

The “ancient” case of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 (1985) should absolutely disabuse anyone of this silly notion." 

Madeleine Thien: ‘In China, you learn a lot from what people don’t tell you’; Guardian, 10/8/16

Claire Armitstead, Guardian; Madeleine Thien: ‘In China, you learn a lot from what people don’t tell you’ :

"Do Not Say We Have Nothing makes the surprising suggestion that part of the solution might lie in the act of copying. The different generations of Marie and Ai-Ming’s families are connected by the manuscript of a novel, “The Book of Records”, chapters of which have been carefully copied out, hidden in walls and beneath floorboards, and passed from hand to hand. “The Book of Records” is precious because it represents a narrative that doesn’t conform to the approved version of Chinese history, Thien explains. “It’s a book with no beginning, no middle and no end, in which the characters are seeing an alternative China where they recognise mirrors of themselves and which they write themselves into.”...

This latest crackdown is yet another variation on the long-running theme of suppression of the individual, making it highly unlikely that either of her mature novels will be published in mainland China, though she hopes they may yet be in Hong Kong. It doesn’t seem too far-fetched to describe them as her own Books of Records, embodying the difficult business of remaining imaginatively free while honouring “contested history”."