A natural language AI writing assistant is the latest in Grammarly’s efforts to help with professional writing.
Genetic AI is steadily moving into the mainstream. Media companies must now monitor AI-generated submissions or AI-facilitated plagiarism. The latest public adopter of AI is Grammarly, which provides spelling and grammar corrections and suggested wording for blog posts and other content.
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The new product, called GrammarlyGo, was announced Thursday and will be available to some users in beta in April. Specifically, this applies to:
- Grammarly Free users in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Poland and Ukraine.
- Subscribers to Grammarly Premium, Grammarly Business and Grammarly for Education.
- Developers using the Grammarly Text Editor SDK.
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What is GrammarlyGo?
GrammarlyGo’s AI is a blend of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and proprietary AI and machine learning models. Grammarly hasn’t decided on a final launch partner for its service, Grammarly PR director Sheridan Smalley told TechRepublic in an email interview.
“As we continue to find new ways to deepen the value we deliver to our customers, we will continue to experiment with the latest LLM (logical machine learning) developments and technologies, including those we build in-house,” said Smalley.
The GPT-3 text and chat AI platform has become a household name due to media coverage, word of mouth and partnerships with Google.
While genetic AI can generate comprehensible prose based on a prompt, natural AI is designed to carry on a real-time conversation with a person as if they were talking to another human. GrammarlyGo is the first.
GrammarlyGo demos writing corporate reports and emails
Grammarly applies its in-house artificial intelligence to written content along with its grammar suggestions. The big change is that, with AI built in, users can enter prompts like “give me an outline for a brief description of the project” in order to get a seemingly original text output. Grammarly uses job descriptions and the short project example to demonstrate this, and claims it can help workers “save time, boost their creativity and get more done.”
Along with receiving prompts, GrammarlyGo asks users to select their desired “formality,” tone,” and “occupation.” From there, it spits out the natural tongue-type response. After the AI makes its first attempt, the user can “improve”, “shorten” or “simplify” the content. Tones range from “direct” to “empathetic.”
In addition, GrammarlyGo is designed to help write emails and long-form documents. Many of the examples show communication between people in the same organization, but nothing prevents in-house writers from also using GrammarlyGo to write audience-facing blog posts or marketing materials.
AI requires a human in the loop to process the information to make sure it’s accurate. For a manager deciding to allow or mandate employees to use this Grammarly feature, it may be a question of balancing short-term efficiency with potential long-term errors.
Search results written by ChatGPT are full of factual errors, as the AI focuses on stringing words together into a coherent, natural-sounding sequence rather than checking the facts of those words. So, for example, a potential employee could come to a job interview with the wrong ideas about a role if AI is integrated early in the hiring process and no human checks it for accuracy.
Grammarly is positioning GrammarlyGo as an effort to capture an end-to-end experience that could expand its content creation work, aiming to go “beyond the editing stage to support our users across the entire lifecycle of communication, including conception and composition’.
Businesses should consider putting in place policies for the use of artificial intelligence such as this that cover details such as: Who should use it? When? How much human supervision does it require?
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Ethics policies can also be helpful, both in terms of what AI is allowed to say and human oversight it receives. Some organizations may want to write who is responsible for potential harm from AI-generated text and how the harm can be addressed.
How Grammarly addresses security and compliance issues
Grammarly emphasized that its product is private and does not record keystrokes or sell data. Some fields, such as birthdays and payment information, prevent Grammarly from seeing them. On the security side, Grammarly stays current with GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA and other geographic security requirements.
The company noted that GrammarlyGo is disabled in the default dashboard and won’t be available to K-12 schools with Grammarly partnerships, so don’t expect AI-written essays from preschoolers — at least not from this particular service .
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