Grammarly Expert Review Controversy: AI Identity Theft & Ethics
Grammarly's Expert Review faces backlash for mimicking journalists and deceased experts without consent. Explore the ethical risks of AI identity theft here.
By Team Gimmie
Updated August 27, 2026
THE IDENTITY IRONY: WHY GRAMMARLY’S LATEST MOVE IS A GHOST STORY
There is a profound, almost dark irony in a communication tool designed to help you find your voice doing so by stealing someone else’s. For years, we have looked to Grammarly as the reliable digital safety net for our prose—the silent partner that catches our typos and fixes our dangling modifiers. But with the launch of its new Expert Review feature, the company has transitioned from a helpful assistant to something far more unsettling: a digital mimic.
This feature promises to provide users with writing advice inspired by subject matter experts. On the surface, it sounds like a sophisticated upgrade. In practice, it has become a cautionary tale about the ethics of artificial intelligence. It turns out that when Grammarly says its advice is inspired by experts, it often means it is using the identities, professional reputations, and specific voices of journalists and academics without their knowledge or consent. When a tool meant to foster better communication begins to treat human identity as a mere data point to be scraped and replicated, we have officially moved past innovation and into the territory of digital identity theft.
THE VOICES IN THE MACHINE: FROM THE VERGE TO THE GRAVE
The scale of this misstep became clear through investigative reporting from The Verge and Wired. Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of The Verge, discovered that Grammarly’s AI was essentially impersonating him. Users seeking feedback might find their work critiqued by an AI persona that not only claimed to be inspired by Patel but mimicked his specific editorial style and professional authority. He was not alone. David Pierce, Sean Hollister, and Tom Warren—all prominent names in tech journalism—found their professional identities being offered up as feature points in a subscription package they never signed up for.
If mimicking the living is an ethical red flag, the Wired investigation revealed something even more macabre. Grammarly’s AI was also drawing on the personas of deceased professors. Imagine a student or a grieving colleague receiving writing advice curated in the style of a mentor who has recently passed away. It is a ghoulish application of technology that prioritizes the illusion of expertise over the basic human dignity of the person being replicated.
