Grammarly Is A Cheating Machine

Grammarly is sometimes thought by instructors to be a relatively benign writing tool app, akin to a sophisticated spelling and grammar checker.

That may have once been true, but as Kieran Barker, an educational associate for academic AI initiatives at Carleton College, shows in a new video, it is now an AI-powered cheating multitool.

As he says, “You can very quickly go from no text at all to what looks like a completed essay… with citations… with examples, etc., with pretty much no friction at all.”

As Barker shows in the video (available here), Grammarly can:

• Answer factual questions
• Write whole papers
• Rewrite the paper it just drafted with a variety of different voices (e.g., “the scholar”, “everyday voice”)
• Automatically detect and offer to rewrite passages that resemble AI-generated text
• Read your paper and automatically apply to it the ideas of other authors it determines are relevant
• Find parts of your text that could use citations, generate those citations, and automatically insert them into the paper
• Predict questions your professor might ask about the paper
• Check online for rubrics and comments from the student’s professor to better predict the grade the paper will get and why, make suggestions in light of this, and then apply these revisions at the click of a button.

In short, it gives students tools with which to cheat, as well as tools explicitly for hiding that they’ve cheated.

Barker writes:

Although Grammarly markets itself as a writing assistant, many of these tools are designed to do your work for you. The fundamental architecture shared by all of Grammarly’s AI tools—the paragraph-by-paragraph suggestion model… makes this clear…  [S]o much of the focus and effort on Grammarly’s end seems to be on its ability to actually rewrite your text.  

On its “Grammarly for Education” webpage, Grammarly boasts that it is “trusted by over 3000 institutions”—presumably educational institutions. Here are some:

Why are educational institutions doing business with a company whose main product undermines their central purpose? I suppose we can ask some of the people involved in those decisions, whose testimonials grace the Grammarly webpage:

Reading these testimonials, I suppose the best one could hope for is that they were given in ignorance of the app’s current capabilities.

You can watch Barker’s video and read his assessment of Grammarly here.

(via Daniel Groll)

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