Why? The ChatGPT interface is not integrated with an editor and not really tailored for writing. I'd wager that most of the current Grammarly users would rather pay for a tailored tool than a chat window that excels at schooling you and refusing to do anything that doesn't align with OpenAI's sprawling brand safety rules.
Of course, GPT-4 can be molded into an editing-centric companion, but I bet Grammarly is already working on that, and they might end up paying OpenAI for the technology.
Brand recognition means that it's a lot easier for Grammarly to build that product than for a random third party to break through.
I found Grammarly to be atrociously bad when dealing with anything slightly technical in nature. It would keep flagging jargon as errors. I was convinced that their $100M+ raise had to be some Adam Neuman-tier grift
I enjoyed Grammarly and I'm sure they enjoyed mapping my prose for training purposes.
When I began to consistently compose 1000+ word passages, all while never triggering a red squiggle, I realized I'd gotten everything I needed from the tool and I uninstalled the addins. (I was a fully paid single user, btw.)
Totally agree. You get so much of personality from honest, unedited emails and messages.
Communication isn’t just information. It’s also how relationships are built. I get an email that was run through a dozen rounds of spell check and AI wizardry and I won’t even know who you really are.
I think their biggest issue is that every place where Grammarly is used (e.g. email clients, word processors) is owned by a much larger corporation with a huge investment in AI that can pretty easily launch a Grammarly replacement as a native feature.
For thousands of years, human language has evolved and changed into what we have today. Now our AI overlords will keep our language static using a paid service. Imagine the new languages and dialects that could have been. Damn you Grammarly!!!
And they were right, too. Language is far more homogenous these days than it's ever been. As for the parent commenter's point, as we encode in software what "correct" language sounds like, it will naturally exert pressure to conform to whatever notion of "correct" that you chose; conformity is literally what things like spellcheck are for. And it's not necessarily a bad thing for languages to be more uniform, especially from the perspective of non-native speakers, but it remains true that it will constrain the future mutation of the language, even if it won't totally halt it.
> Specially from the perspective of non-native speakers.
Mind you, non-native speakers tend to involuntarily stretch and bend the language this way and that. It’s when somebody else in society uses that involuntary bending and stretching to mark and segregate foreigners that tools like Grammarly come handy. And, that’s my grudge with Grammarly: to me, most of its suggestions read as “you are not writing pureblood, your written mongrel will earn you the scorn of your betters.”
Gee, that makes it sound like cloud-hosted products are susceptible to data center outages just like products that rely on colocated and contracted hosting. Impossible!
It’s interesting because I have so much trouble getting Grammarly to work (I thought that announcement would justify the problem), but it’s far more prosaic than that:
- the little indicator hides the content that I’m writing and can’t be moved;
- if I dismiss a problem, it will ignore it for a second until I approve another one and immediately flag the first problem again;
- occasionally, it won’t apply the recommended change;
- some changes make the entire browser think I’m trying to reload or close the page… not sure, but the browser is not happy about that.
- It occasionally overrides the editor in fairly catastrophic ways: puts the edited word and the rest of what I’ve written afterward somewhere random in the editing window, duplicating half of my response and overwriting entire paragraphs. It’s pretty destructive and frustrating, breaking Ctrl+Z and the entire editor.
I’m impressed at how smart it is: detects unnecessary words, catches trailing 's's, and knows when to apply Oxford commas… but I’d love not to have to reload HN because editing five paragraphs in a '90s interface and its 40kb of overhead is enough to cause kernel panic.
There isn't a local free software alternative to Grammarly for english ? I means, to verify grammar and spelling, the AI part, I don't expect it to be local yet.
The day I typed my first question into ChatGPT I cancelled my gmrly subscription. If they'd a public stock I'll be shorting it so hard.