[lewisjoe]

Grammarly has been having an identity crisis ever since LLMs made grammar checking accessible to every company at a fraction of the cost. ChatGPT is killing a lot of companies and grammarly was the first collateral.

This acquisition is concerning because Grammarly is well known for its bad privacy policy and how it's essentially a keylogger. Now that it has access to probably thousands of companies data hosted on Coda is a huge concern.

But it's high time Grammarly evolves itself into some other product or die trying.

[elondaits]

The other day, Grammarly marked a grammar error in my text. I wasn’t too sure about it, so I asked ChatGPT (4o) to explain it. It agreed with Grammarly. I wasn’t convinced and didn’t understand ChatGPTs justification, so I asked again but using the more advanced o1 model… this time ChatGPT said Grammarly was wrong.

… ChatGPT is good at improving grammar, but it doesn’t “understand” what it’s doing (by design), and doesn’t have a complete and consistent ruleset, which is what you want in a grammar checker. Also, grammar and style rules change with time, and you want to have good and precise control of what rules you’re applying.

[gradschool]

Can you share the alleged error and the arguments for and against it?

[dr_kiszonka]

I am perplexed by Grammarly getting progressively worse as time goes by. I am seriously considering spending a weekend or two on writing myself a small LLM powered clone. I think a browser extension for Gmail should be relatively easy. I am not sure about Word (desktop) and Google Docs though.

[jerrygoyal]

> I think a browser extension for gmail should be relatively easy.

Hold your beer, I built that https://chatgptwriter.ai

[dr_kiszonka]

Haha nicely done!

However, it is more expensive than Grammarly's annual plan and there is no Office app. I do like the different models, though, and it looks very polished.

Have you considered letting users add their own "writing tones"? I have a few Custom GPTs for different types of recipients. Perhaps your users would like such a feature.

[jerrygoyal]

> Have you considered letting users add their own "writing tones"?

Even better, I recently implemented the Prompt Template feature. You can create as many prompt templates as you like and insert them with one click. It's a recent feature, so the landing page is not updated, but you can try it for free (without adding a credit card) at https://chatgptwriter.ai/extension.

[NewsaHackO]

This seems to be one of those glorified ChatGPT API wrappers. Only available on Chromium, free tier is 15 corrections a month with the next recommended tier being $350 dollars a year. I think I'll pass.

[layer8]

> I am perplexed by Grammarly getting progressively worse as time goes by.

Leadership issue.

[kreyenborgi]

> I am perplexed by Grammarly getting progressively worse as time goes by

They switched from parse trees and rules to LLMs, presumably some things got better and some got worse

[fakedang]

Grammarly may have been collateral damage, but the first target to be nuked was Chegg.

[CamelCaseName]

Students these days have no idea of the struggle.

Then again, I can't imagine the struggle of having to rely entirely on libraries pre-internet

[gosub100]

I graduated in the mid 2000s, and right around that time they moved the main library collection into a mechanical bin that you have to request an attendant to request books for you.

I have fond memories of looking up X, and going to the library and exploring the section where X was stored, along with all the books around it. this experience is dead now with their new "system". It's been about 20 years and I'm an old dog now with limited energy. but I would love to (if I were a political activist) do an expose story about how many books were checked out before this transfer was made vs after. I strongly suspect that a lot of knowledge was lost, just due to the friction of having to know which exact book you want, vs having the liberty to browse and freely select whatever you stumbled upon. and not all the info is online, now. due to licensing and copyright. Google Books tried to fight that, but lost. It's sad.

[girvo]

I loved going through our (small) programming & computers section in our school library in the early 2000s, and visiting the local library with a much larger one. I picked up PHP because of that :)

[pjmlp]

As a 70's child I wouldn't call it a struggle, at least we didn't saw it like that.

[Baeocystin]

Microfiche are amazing, that's what I remember most.

[dougb5]

We had fewer distractions, though, even if we didn't have all the world's information so close at hand. I think I'd pick that struggle again over what today's students go through. But I'm glad to have lived in both eras.

[lchengify]

I'm not that old, and I still remember being really disappointed when something wasn't in my home (book) Encyclopedia. Then you would trudge to the library to find maybe one book on the obscure topic.

You could request a book be sent from another library, but that would take weeks, and you had no idea what was in that book.

It was wild. Most things were just unknown, or whatever you parents told you.

[raincole]

I didn't even know Grammarly had so much cash that they can acquire something. I thought it was on the road of being acquired since GPT 3.5 was out.

[nomilk]

Is Grammarly anything more than glorified autocorrect?

Curious if anyone here uses it, and if so, what value it provides (I've been bombarded with its ads for years, but could never see what value it provides). Even a quick search of its website gives inanely basic examples (like correcting Ive to I've) [1].

[1] https://support.grammarly.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047727871...

[aaronharnly]

I myself do not, but some people I know who are intelligent and articulate and also dyslexic struggle to get their thoughts expressed in writing adequately for professional life, especially in the “everyone live co-editing” environment these days. Many of them report Grammarly being a valuable tool for them to feel like they’re on a more even playing field.

So yes, fancy autocorrect, but apparently better enough to matter for them.

[soneca]

Having English as a second language, it was essential for me for a long time. I never understood why they never marketed to that public.

I don’t pay for it anymore because I am more comfortable in my current company where I am sure my colleagues won’t be bothered by frequent mistakes and misspellings. Also, for the eventual more important text that I want to be grammatically perfect, there is free ChatGPT now.

[stevenpetryk]

It’s a glorified autocorrect. It is not useful for people who are already decent at writing.

[skeeter2020]

My CTO uses it, which is frankly, terrifying. We'll be in a shared screen session editing slides for a board meeting or very sensitive docs, and their little UI prompts are shining away.

...and it's not like it improves his grammar or spelling - they're still terrible!

[antihipocrat]

Is the CTO aware that the information being checked could be leaked to a competitor?

[azinman2]

Do you think Grammarly is offering up individual’s logs to the highest bidder?

[antihipocrat]

A leak has already happened:

https://www.engadget.com/2018-02-06-grammarly-patches-seriou...

[azinman2]

You mean there was a vulnerability, that they claim was patched within hours of release and never exploited, and only affected the Grammarly Editor interface?

At that point you might as well include every OS because everything contains saved data and vulnerabilities. That’s extremely different than grammarly collecting and selling off private data that they promise is private.

If your competitors are trying to actively hack you and steal your data…

[pona-a]

Grammarly at least used to be deterministic and fast. Its edits are consistent and its mistakes are easier to spot. That alone is enough of a value proposition over LLMs, especially since their tech required years of computational linguistics research, whereas anyone can write an OpenAI API wrapper...

[heraldgeezer]

What? But in chatgpt I have to copy it to chatgpt.

With Grammarly it's right here in the text box as I am typing.

[ChumpGPT]

>his acquisition is concerning because Grammarly is well known for its bad privacy policy and how it's essentially a keylogger. Now that it has access to probably thousands of companies data hosted on Coda is a huge concern.

And how does ChatGPT differ?