It's a keylogger.

Lmao sucks that it had to be the IT dept

and namedropped the procurement person

I think "unhinged" is a ridiculous word for it. They aren't crazy.

"Outrageous" is better. This will work on a lot of people, and they really will email their managers, because they're sheep. But it won't actually change the managers' minds for the positive. If I got wind of a plot like this against my decision, it would absolutely convince me to stay the course.

If the employees want to complain, I'll listen. If they're encouraged to complain, forget it.

The thing that didn't happen does sounds reasonable.

It's in the sysadmin sub because we are routinely the people told buy and manage Grammarly deployments, and we're the people generally cancelling those services now given everyone is being pushed to use their flavor of AI instead. And those emails from users upset that we're doing what management told us to do (following this Grammarly advice)? They go from end users to sysadmins.

Doesn't appear to be what's happening though.

We let them know we weren't going to renew and they sent these unsolicited emails and popups in their app to all of the users who had licenses

Not "our app".

I have a rule, if I hear an advert that I didn't search for on any video site, I say "fuck off <company name>" to ensure I form a negative association with the brand. I've definitely heard "grammarly" far too many times to ever spend a penny on them.

This is extreme short sightedness.

We have no proof but it feels like someone asked Claude how to reduce churn and picked an option.

I guess consumers are going to have to “push back” often in the near future.

They must be desperate

I'm surprised people get worked up about this. I've felt like folks have learned to tolerate much worse and manipulative behavior from companies in the last two decades of personal computing... Not that I like it. I believed that society kind of accepted dystopia. Is it just that people are more sensitive because this happened in a corporate setting?

You know it's bad when you make your user switch to Microsoft faster.

Here in Australia unless that particular user that received the emails gave consent to receive marketing emails (and the emails have identification + unsubscribe) it would be violating our Spam act.

https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2024-07/guide/consumer-...

The principle here, for anyone confused, is that a consumer has very weak negotiating power against a business and therefore needs basic rights, but when two businesses negotiate, it's a level playing field and if they wanted those rights they would've been easily able to get them.

Fair. The agencies are one tool, but the payment intermediary is usually the one that actually moves - a chargeback often does more than an ECC complaint ever will

Damn it feels good to be an American eagle sounds

I added "in you jurisdiction" on purpose.

The difference isn’t nil, but the point is that these institutions can be quite effective.

I’ve reported issues to the DPA (Data Protection Agency) of Belgium and they handled it reasonably well, which I didn’t expect either.

Marketing tactics are part of consumer issues and many countries seem to have good consumer protection laws. Of course Grammarly’s issue was towards/against a business, and that colours the problem. I think the damage to their reputation is enough punishment, but there might be other ways to tackle this.

I merely fail to see the point of “oh well, the Humanity, what can we do”. Apathy is death.

Bad business practices, this sometimes also ends up in the agency reaching out to the related companies.

Or having their names listed in industry reports, which their marketing departments usually don't like.

I tried to report Linkedin for their practices and it was like spitting at the sky trying to hit God

I have a different experience, Verbraucherzentrale has helped me putting Vodafone on their place regarding a phone contract that seemed almost impossible to cancel.

In the UK that would be trading standards, and unless it's a local shop selling un-taxed cigarettes they're useless.

They are an AI business, just a more focused one. The creepy information gathering, the way it blandifies output and encourages reliance over building communication and language skills, it's all the same problems frontier companies have writ small. Their lunch is being eaten by bigger fish and they're shamelessly trying to remain relevant. This will not result in any less spying or bad behavior.

Just wait until the emails threaten to reveal all the compromising messages that users unwittingly sent to Grammarly's servers ...

I suspect they're also losing a lot of university subscriptions after they started advertising how they offer a service to make LLM-written text look human-written, if I recall correctly they even explicitly advertised that you could use it to cheat. I don't know what they were thinking with that marketing campaign given that universities are probably one of their biggest market segments.

this. My not-at-all technical partner often comments to me that whatever youtuber is reading from an ai script and just turns off whatever we're watching. I assume similar happens in other areas.

For her its rarely the specific tells ("not-x-but-y" etc) but rather its bad metaphors and analogies that get her.

Most people don't care what the other person thinks about their email so long as their boss thinks they are doing their job (and their boss is usually the one paying/telling them to use AI) and the other side responds. Should they? Probably, but everyone should probably do a lot of things we don't.

I feel a tinge when I see an AI written email that is longer than it needs to be/boring to read but I still need to engage whatever it was they were emailing about anyways.

If you build a nice writing guideline, you can impersonate Mark Twain if you want with any model.

They are losing because they embraced AI at the detriment of what they where doing well.

It was a good tool, that worked, paid for it for a couple of months and then they decided to go with AI and using my writing for training.

i wonder how much of this is a consequence of AI...

Most analytics tools have the ability to create segments (for example, you could create a group of users who are part of an account that is not going to renew their plan).

And then they have the ability to send emails and notifications to users in a segment.

I wonder how much companies are running agents with access to their analytics tools, and letting them build their own campaigns.

I asked ChatGPT to design a campaign to reduce churn for a SaaS like Grammarly, and it came up with a very similar idea.

Grammarly was founded in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2009 by Ukrainians Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider, and it still maintains a major office in Kyiv alongside its international headquarters

Part of the reason.

Later edit: Meaning some of the people from that part of the world have become accustomed with this type of behaviour knowing full-well that there will be no repercussions, to the contrary, it wouldn't surprise me to read that canceling a contract with Grammarly means giving in to the Russians.

I loved Grammarly. But it has changed post LLM boom. The underlying concept was awesome as they take grammatical rules from a book of english grammar rules into a linter. Then it let you select the tone and adjusted some for marketing/engagement so it sounds good on Twitter. I have severe dyslexia and struggled with tone.

Lately, like following ChatGPT 3.5 release era, I had found Grammarly now replacing entire sentences with LLM replacement which are random and inject bias to being near useless. It did this some before. The problem is I can't even tell if it's defensible from a grammatical point when it uses an LLM to do this. At some point Grammarly reached too far in the cookie jar and I no longer trusted that someone who read the Grammar rule book verified any part of the elaborate suggestions.

I haven't logged in for months. I guess I was no longer learning from it. I need to take a closer look but sys admin outrage from pushy sales people doesn't bode well in my mind.

Sad to see this. We had student licenses at our university for writing theses and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even as an (ex)native speaker. Felt more like working with an editor than the “helpful coworker” vibe of current AI tools.

Never understood their browser integration though, ugh. Scanning private messages was already a bad look, I shouldn’t be surprised…

You can use Grammarly via an API, or simply submit text in a web interface.

It's a keylogger in the same way Vim is a keylogger.

Grammarly is a keylogger. Good riddance.

I think Grammarly is quite obviously in trouble since LLMs went so mainstream. And while I think AI-powered replacements are a great threat, I reckon an even bigger one is the decline of writing itself.

If Gmail suggests the whole email (and whatever model it's using has baked in whatever suggestions Grammarly would've had), nobody needs feedback on an email they didn't even write?

Slack notifies all admins of a workspace if a payment failed :)

But then it's only admins, not all users, and it may make sense in case the workspace owner is distracted/incapacitated etc.

What ruins the "we care about your workspace" part though is how the message is phrased as a threat. Fail to pay and you'll lose acces to this and that and that other thing...

I don't see a problem with this. B2B2C is a tricky dance with many stakeholders whose business needs are often ignored. If procurement cancels a service that users need without telling the users, which they have been known to do, that's a big problem.