Gone are the days when Grammarly was just a helpful little spellchecker. Presently, it’s capitalizing on the AI hype cycle as much as anyone else, and on Monday, it announced a new suite of AI agents for students that will definitely raise a few eyebrows.
As spotlighted by The Verge, Grammarly is now offering an “AI grader agent” that provides a student with personalized feedback on their assignment and even claims to predict what grade they’ll get. And one of the ways the AI does this, Grammarly boasts, is by gathering “publicly available instructor information.”
“AI Grader is designed for students who want to predict how their work will land with their instructor and take control of their grades,” reads a page on Grammarly’s website.
The details on how it gathers this information are vague, but in a video example provided by the company, a user fills out a menu with the instructor’s name, their institution, and the class they’re teaching. The user also uploads a rubric, which the AI examines to tailor its feedback, according to Grammarly.
Then the AI Grader goes to work.
“Looking up your instructor,” the AI says. “Reviewing public teaching info. Identifying key grading priorities.”
Then the bad news hits: “Predicted grade 78/100.”
It’s an alarmingly invasive way to get feedback on your work, even if the AI isn’t able to “look up” all that much about a teacher (and if it is, then it’s even worse.) In short, it’s the principle of the thing that’s so ugly: is it really necessary to automatically surveil your instructor just to get feedback — displayed under the label “The professor may say…” — that sounds pretty generic anyway?
“Contexts could be more deeply theorized,” says one example; “now clarify the flow,” reads another.
And not unlike a war profiteer that sells to both sides of a conflict, Grammarly is also offering tools that could be helpful to educators to weed out AI slop, including an AI Detector agent to check for AI-generated content, and a Plagiarism Checker agent.
All of these, however, are nominally marketed as being intended for students — so the framing for the Plagiarism Checker, for example, is that it can help you “identify unintentional similarities” in the paper you’re about to submit that was absolutely not written with ChatGPT. Related: Grammarly has another AI tool called the “AI Humanizer” agent, which can “make your AI-assisted writing sound more natural and engaging without changing what you mean to say.”
If this just sounds like Grammarly is giving students a way to turn off their brains, you’ve got it all wrong: it’s merely readying students for a world where colleges are already forcing them to use AI. Ditto for their jobs, if their bosses don’t decide to replace them with a chatbot.
“Students today need AI that enhances their capabilities without undermining their learning,” Jenny Maxwell, head of Grammarly for Education, said in a statement.
“Grammarly’s new agents fill this gap,” she added. “By teaching students how to work effectively with AI now, we’re preparing them for a workplace where AI literacy will be essential.”
Grammarly will be rolling out the AI agents for Free and Pro users on its new docs “AI-native writing surface” platform — just in time for the fall semester.
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