A lot of journalism folks are offering editing advice as Grammarly’s AI 'experts'
Pretty soon, I won’t have to edit Nieman Lab stories anymore. Instead, I’ll have AI edit them as me. And I get tired of “myself,” I can move on to get edits from other people who write about journalism.
At least, that’s the idea behind “Expert Review,” a feature from AI editing software Grammarly that promises “writing feedback by subject-matter experts.”
“Instead of producing what looks like a generic critique from a nameless LLM,” Wired reported last week, Expert Review “lists a number of real academics and authors available to weigh in on your text. To be clear: Those people have nothing to do with this process.”1
On Friday, Verge writer Stevie Bonifield tested the feature and found a number of familiar names: “The AI-generated feedback included comments that appeared to be from The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, as well as editor-at-large David Pierce and senior editors Sean Hollister and Tom Warren,” as well as many other tech journalists, “including former Verge editors Casey Newton and Joanna Stern, former Verge writer Monica Chin, Wired’s Lauren Goode, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier, The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon, Gizmodo’s Raymond Wong, Digital Foundry founder Richard Leadbetter, Tom’s Guide editor-in-chief Mark Spoonauer, former Rock Paper Shotgun editor-in-chief Katharine Castle, and former IGN news director Kat Bailey.”
I’ll stress again that none of these people gave their permission to have their names used by this feature. In fact, that’s something Grammarly itself, in the style of noted legal scholar and digital copyright expert Pamela Samuelson, flagged when I ran an early draft of this story through it.
Naturally, I was curious to know if I recognized other names in Expert Review. So I ran some recently published Nieman Lab stories (ones I’d edited or written) through Grammarly Docs to see what the “experts” had to say. (I did this by signing up for a a free trial of Grammarly Pro, which offers unlimited access to Expert Review.) Turns out you all have been busy! (Sometimes under your old job titles — as The Verge noted, many of Grammarly’s job titles are outdated, including those for some of the people below.)
Here are some of the names I saw providing suggestions, and the advice given:
“Marty Baron” on “Newsonomics: Will national news shrink even faster than local news did?“
“Carrie Brown” on the same Newsonomics story:
“Margaret Sullivan” on “AI-powered search is fueling a wave of Epstein Files transparency projects“:
“Emily Bell” on “Journalism coops seem utopian. What’s it like working in one?“
“Meredith D. Clark” on the same journalism coops story:
“Jay Rosen” on “The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig on her ‘hypothetical,’ heavily reported measles essay“
“Rasmus Kleis Nielsen” on “When just showing the video isn’t enough: Minneapolis shooting puts news organizations to the test“
“Penny Abernathy” on “Sports betting reshaped newsrooms, and it’s ‘a little gross.’ Now, here come the prediction markets“:
“Craig Silverman” on “In Minneapolis and other U.S. cities, Bellingcat supplements local news by ‘zooming in with a forensic lens’”:
“Joshua Benton” on the same Bellingcat story:
“Jay Rosen” had another suggestion for me after I ran this story through Expert Review: I should open it up to you all and see what you think.
“What if the final line invited readers to test the feature themselves and share outcomes — would that deepen engagement and illustrate communal stakes?” the suggestion read. “A participatory prompt could transform your discovery into an industry-wide conversation.”
When I ran the piece through a second time, though, I got a blunter suggestion from “Jane Singer,” professor emerita of journalism innovation in the Department of Journalism at City St. George’s University of London:
“Invite next step reflection for affected journalists,” was the suggestion. “What call-to-action could you add — perhaps encouraging writers to check whether they’re listed and to request removal?”
- Jen Dakin, senior communications manager at Grammarly Parent company Superhuman, gave Wired a statement: “Our Expert Review agent examines the writing a user is working on, whether it’s a marketing brief or a student project on biodiversity, and leverages our underlying LLM to surface expert content that can help the document’s author shape their work. The suggested experts depend on the substance of the writing being evaluated. The Expert Review agent doesn’t claim endorsement or direct participation from those experts; it provides suggestions inspired by works of experts and points users toward influential voices whose scholarship they can then explore more deeply.”