31. Yes, Grammarly, I Have Had a Negative Experience With You

Make it reasonable, make it diplomatic, make it subtle...More ideas?

A senior has used A.I. to produce short essays on five occasions this year. In a meeting with parents and an administrator, she explained my unfortunate misunderstanding. On several of the quizzes in question, she’d used Grammarly as opposed to Chat GPT. 

In her view, that settled things.

If she were a follower of current events, she might know that, this spring, a University of North Georgia student appealed an academic probation she’d received for revising with Grammarly, sparking a debate in academic circles about the degree to which using any A.I. tool for any amount of writing or editing amounts to plagiarism. 

Grammarly has been around for 15 years. Its A.I. product is only a year old. Still, if you set up a free account and play with the possibilities, you will realize that only a notably ethical student would be able to use its proofreading and revision tools without being tempted by the green bulb winking next to the Generative AI option. 

The A.I. wave began building two years ago. Last year, every few months, as a public high school English teacher in Northern California, I encountered one or two submissions of obvious A.I. provenance. This year, I read about four or five for each prompt I assign—whether the work hinges on inquiry, creative expression, or arguing a position. A reading quiz is easy pickings, but several students used A.I. to write children’s books for a creative writing task accompanying The Stranger. A few used it for a collective autofiction project assigned with There There. I am currently helping my senior English students plan and draft speeches, a sort of miniature Ted Talks for the entire graduating class, and at least a handful will surely try to A.I. this as well. 

The nature of the writing assignment matters less than you’d expect. Students reach like Gatsby for that green light, hoping for a faster path to the coveted grade. I read curiously formal emails from ordinarily informal kids as well as crisply structured swaths of error-free prose with robotic transitions and impeccably cited evidence of slightly relevant research. An unschooled person’s idea of how a schooled person writes.

To use Grammarly, students drop a chunk of text into the interface or simply type there and immediately see suggested fixes for each phrase and clause. I find real-time feedback stressful and distracting, but then again I’m old and already know how to write. Students can accept suggested changes and learn why they’ve been suggested—with the idea that, after seeing a pattern of errors, they may stop making them in the first place. The help is limited without a premium subscription ($12 a month) but this tool alone doesn't bother me. Do you know how tired I am of telling kids where to put a comma? End the heartache, Grammarly! 

It’s just Grammarly, goes the teen refrain, and indeed: the University of North Georgia student from that viral story is not uncommonly viewed as a victim of reactionary policing and undiscerning A.I. checkers. For deliberate plagiarists, Grammarly doesn’t carry the baggage of Chat GPT and its ilk.

I see Grammarly as a Trojan horse. It poses as a constructive bulwark against the minor errors often plaguing an otherwise promising piece of writing. Adept use of paragraphs, commas, and periods can keep my eyes from bleeding 500 words into a never-ending paragraph. Even solid writers can use an extra pair of eyes, right? Why not hand off rudimentary feedback to the likes of T.A. Grammarly, and then devote more time to responding to drafts with my trademark empathy, notorious humor, and experience with each student’s unique abilities and documented writing patterns? 

Unfortunately, Grammarly launders plagiarism. It enables cheating and yet scolds a user for transparently begging it to cheat. Ask Grammarly to compare Hamlet with Euphoria. Do not ask Grammarly to write a 1000-word paper on the subject. Input the prompt your teacher gives you but don’t reveal the purpose. Ask in the right way and you will get the desired result spat across the screen in seconds. 

You can set a word count, target an audience, and adjust tone and pitch. Make it persuasive. Make it assertive. Make it confident. Make it formal. It’s like using an app to add condiments to a deli sandwich. You can demand a joke (it will be lame). You can request references to other texts (they will be cursory). You can choose to acknowledge your use of generative A.I. (you won’t).

Grammarly coaches students to believe that a dramatic outsourcing of the thinking and planning process in writing amounts to a small assist. On a meandering bathroom break stroll through the halls, students can generate a topic, thesis, and polished content. Simultaneously, they can hold in their heads (or pretend to) the notion that this is all perfectly legitimate and authentic. After all, they knew what was required; they had a sense of what they would want to have written. They just needed help getting started. Grammarly happened to give them something better.

Students have now been conditioned to see the generation of an idea as, essentially, a tedious obstacle rising up between the moment a task is assigned and the moment at which it can be graded. Learning to embrace writing and certainly even thinking isn’t easy. Learning to embrace feeling is now the new frontier, an education challenge for the teacher in 2024 and probably many years to come.

Make it empathetic. Make it inspirational. Grammarly says it can help you with those pesky imperatives as well—simulating not just the experience of having read, of knowing a character, a plot, of having grappled with a batch of ideas, or having invented ideas of your own, but also a passable human reaction to human expression. 

Make it efficient. You won’t find this exact option on Grammarly, but this is the life command students have been motivated to most prioritize. Students born in the mid-to-late 00s have never known a time in which business and entertainment world triumphs were not strategically displayed online, in which content creation was not a reasonable career goal for teens who might otherwise buy guitars or aspire to act, in which peers were not also accounts and lives understood as timelines. No small number of dubious business and social media role models dismiss the point of reading books. Teens have heard in so many words from so many people that there’s no road to winning that doesn’t run through the sciences or business or scams. They’re only following the market they’ve been told matters most.

I am workshopping ideas with students for those senior speeches. Every year, they struggle with actually identifying what they know, believe, and need to share. They often have to narrow a bloated focus or pluck a shining gem from a muddy ramble. I don’t even know where to begin. I hear it often, this very reasonable sentiment. Looking at yourself is an intimate act. It is challenging. I teach students how to look: to pair up and interview one another, to make timelines, to consider hidden talents or unusual preoccupations. I’ve heard amazing final speeches about car repair, fending off cat-callers, and the joy of fighting with family members at the dinner table. 

Over the past nine years, surely some students have searched for inspiration online, with predictably well-tread results. Why you should live in the moment! Why procrastination is dangerous! With Grammarly, students can skip even the subsequent struggle—another piece of the human part—and just pluck content from the engineered ether.

And I tell students that, contrary to their transparent preference, revision, not drafting, is the real game of writing. I gave a graduation speech three years ago and probably combed over it 20 times before deeming it ready. Students need to spin through their work over and over like a potter at the wheel, smoothing, shaping, scraping, glazing. This is satisfying work, practice for a reflective life, the acceptance of meaningful processes to achieve meaningful results, and while perfection may be unreachable, this is obviously human too: the struggle to elevate a text—or the story of its maker—to be its best possible self. 

I don’t want to return to blackboards and chalk. I have students document their work with digital portfolios. My journalism class publishes an online magazine. I think web discussion forums help students socialize around texts and ideas. But I teach with the understanding that the tech world is never going to make products to purely support the education and health of students. To profit, along with slurping up data, they will make enticing and often very useful tools that promise efficiency and simplicity where complexity and frustration are not just common but necessary. Students do not require the excision of struggle. They should not learn to communicate through filters. If you become so accustomed to your face with its proportions altered and skin wiped clean of blemishes, you may stop being able to stomach yourself without such illusions. The new face feels more real, and so the Grammarly-generated text too becomes truly and entirely yours, not a convenient and unethical fraud.

The musician and legendary audio engineer Steve Albini recently died unexpectedly. I was a big Shellac fan in my youth and remain enamored of his approach to recording music and his integrity in an industry accustomed to robbing it. It’s hard to imagine an indie audio engineer dedicated to analog tools and techniques achieving even minor celebrity status in 2024. I know enough about playing and recording music to understand that documenting the real sound of an artist is a deceptively simple notion. It’s as challenging as deciding what in your mind and history is worth a speech, an essay, or a song. 

To record and mix, you consider where to place microphones, how to balance frequencies and pieces of a larger puzzle, what to compress, whether to make sounds feel intimate or far away, whether to let instruments remain distinct or bleed into clumps. And then the performers aren't always cooperative. For the engineer to have any chance at capturing a faithful document, the artists have to crave authenticity. They can’t hide. They can’t bury subpar efforts in sonic gunk. 

Kids do compose and perform with their work in my class, and I want their real selves, faithful documents of authentic ideas, rendered as clear and alive as a great Albini recording—like Low’s Things We Lost in the Fire or The Magnolia Electric Co. by Songs: Ohia. Students read The Great Gatsby in 11th grade, and one of the essential ideas we discuss is that, 100 years after Fitzgerald published the novel, from pop culture and business, they’ve learned to valorize a ruthless all-American nobody-to-somebody story. Students wear Scarface shirts to school without having seen the movie. Yet, they also regurgitate the all-American idea that working hard and playing by the rules leads to success—and, while they romanticize Gatsby’s longing, they frown on his fakery.

Grammarly smoothes over the discomfort that comes with pretending to be what you know you aren’t. The consequence is, without intended hyperbole, an incremental erosion of personhood. The founder of dating app Bumble recently announced plans to introduce A.I.-powered “dating concierges” that can flirt and probe on a user’s behalf, narrowing down an overwhelming sea of romantic possibilities more efficiently than any human user with obligations to the world outside their phone. This invention is predicated on the idea that people don’t have the time to pick the right words or get to know each other, or can’t afford to make a mistake or risk hanging out with an incompatible person for an hour. 

Of course, without such inventions, without their creators pretending that they’re only making life more efficiently fruitful, we wouldn’t even entertain such a ridiculous and grim idea: this new sense that, as clocks press forward and you run faster and stretch out your arms for the future you’ve concluded you deserve, it’s simply too much work to be yourself.

Postscript

Last night, almost immediately after I scheduled this reasonably sculpted newsletter for publication, I received an email from a student whose parent had recently contacted me out of concern for their grade. The parent had agreed with my diagnosis: the kid was underachieving, was tired of high school and ready for college, and maybe needed to learn a lesson in humility. We agreed: the kid (let’s called them Taylor) would perhaps best learn this lesson without grown-ups swooping in to bully or cajole them into more effort. Taylor, confident and winning, acknowledged the conversation I’d had with the parent and admitted that, yes, they were pretty ready to move on. Taylor had turned in the draft of a personal essay and a (slightly late) response to an essay I’ve recently had my journalism students read as a “professional” model: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s “Waking up From the American Dream.”

Could I read the draft? Offer up some tips?

I read the personal narrative quickly (the draft isn’t due for a while, so my goal was, at 9:30 p.m., to give quick guidance about theme, structure, and voice). The prose was extremely descriptive, as perfumed as a flower shop filled with wilting wares, as sweet as a September candy apple dipped in extra caramel and consumed with a shot of Schnapps, as—the portrait of a single scene in nature, accompanied by a superficial reflection on the importance of the moment. I complimented the prose—at least Taylor was going for it—and remarked that it was a bit odd that they’d hyped up the beauty of the scene, dousing the reader in sensory detail, but then sort of dropped the bottom out of the essay with the reflection. In other words, I expected something a little more—I don’t know—revealing?

More…human?

The existing sentiment could more or less be boiled down to: I felt alive in nature.

Fine, Emerson, very cool. Could…you…tell…me…what…alive…feels like?

I read the article response next.

…Her youth was affected by the Civil Rights Movement, her teens by Vietnam War protests and second-wave feminism, and her adulthood by the Reagan era and the AIDS crisis. The Clinton administration's economic policies and the Rodney King riots had an impact on her midlife. Still, the 9/11 attacks, the 2008 financial crisis, and the opposing presidencies of Obama and Trump highlight her later life. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights personal resilience and systemic failures, revealing how individuals' lives are deeply interrelated…

…Financial insecurity and sacrifices for educational possibilities jeopardize their well-being and limit the author's economic mobility, exposing a stark contrast between the romanticized concept of the American Dream and the terrible realities of realizing it…

Yeah, okay. Several A.I. checkers flagged it. My brain flagged it. Not a single direct reference to the text, a raft of lingo the student has never used elsewhere, references to historical events the student knows nothing about, events that may have formed some context for the narrative but were not directly referenced in the text.

Except for the Civil Rights Movement and teen-years-during-Vietnam-protests and Rodney King parts, and…

See, Villavicencio was born in 1989, so, nice one, Grammarly, you absolute dunce.

It was so clearly the product of not reading or thinking (or feeling) and yet, undoubtedly, the author had asked Grammarly to make it sound authoritative and academic.

I tossed my prompts into Grammarly and, sure enough, after twisting a few suggested knobs, ended up with a response quite similar to what Taylor had turned in.

I wrote Taylor a comment: the usual bit about being concerned about A.I. use. I added a slightly pointed remark about being surprised Taylor would guess I’d be so easy to deceive. And then I went to bed.

When I woke up at 5:30 a.m. this morning, I started laughing. Quietly. I knew—as if my smarter self had nudged me in my sleep.

I opened Taylor’s narrative draft on my phone and, squinting, reread it more closely. The sky was “velvety purple.” There was a “symphony of sounds.” The ocean was “a vast mirror reflecting the sky’s fiery display.”

The battery of A.I. checkers confirmed my suspicions, but all I really had to do was read the draft a few more times to find it, not just more than a little florid, but entirely laughable—a certified Grammarly skin job (to borrow Blade Runner parlance).

It turned out, in rushing through my initial pass, thinking about half-watching Bodkin and maybe reading the last remaining chunk of Already Dead, I’d been a tad lazy, a bit distracted.

That is, all too human.