Is it okay to use Grammarly?

No, it is not.

Let me back up a little and explain. As readers of the Arena probably know, I am a historian, editor, and writer who fits her professional work into the nooks and crannies of her main work of rearing and homeschooling four children. I write in fits and spurts and late-night manias and generally feel like I’m careening down a rocky hill. A little help in my writing from some Artificial Intelligence might seem like a good choice, just to save me a little time with the basics of writing a first draft or proofreading and revising.

In light of this, it might be surprising to hear how completely I oppose the use of tools like Grammarly. For those who haven’t seen the commercials or tried Grammarly itself, Grammarly is a free AI program that will proofread your writing for spelling and grammar mistakes, but also will suggest edits for tone, succinctness, and other niceties. In fact, it will even actually write or rewrite phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and even whole drafts for you. The Grammarly website bills it as a “writing partner that helps you find the words you need” and “ensures your writing and reputation shine.”

Note that Grammarly is a “that,” not a “who.” It is not an editor or proofreader, but a digital ghostwriter who requires no acknowledgment. Grammarly is there to make you look like a better writer than you are. It is a kingmaker, a foil, a wingman there to make you “shine.”

Recently, I learned through some offhand comments I saw on Substack Notes (which is kind of like Twitter) that some Substack writers habitually use Grammarly in their work. I’m sure that this is reasonable from their point of view, so I’m not trying to offer a moral judgment of these particular writers here. But friends, imagine my distress: some of these people are younger, fledgling writers whom I have been going out of my way to encourage and affirm in what I thought was their writing. But perhaps I was not actually even seeing them, not even hearing their own thoughts or seeing their own written words. Perhaps I was just looking at something shiny instead.

I felt hoodwinked. I felt foolish. And I felt sad.

The reason is that in my opinion, writing is two things above all: it is a craft, and it is a personal communication. (I suppose some technical writing might be excepted from this.) Writing that claims to be from me to you but is actually from me and my Bot—or even just my Bot—to you is inauthentic and sometimes even deceitful. It involves a person in the reader, but the personhood conveyed through the writing is compromised. This writing involves impersonation as much or more as it involves a real person in the human author. And insofar as writing is a craft, if I were in a Medieval-style guild for writers, I can’t imagine letting an apprentice pose as a master or even a journeyman simply because he had found a way to impersonate one, to produce something that poses as masterful work.

Guildmasters don’t produce—they create.

We’re all at fault in this mess we’ve made. We are not teaching students to read or to write well, and then when they move into college and then full adulthood, they can perform the technical actions of reading and writing but find them uncomfortable and nervewracking. So they are afraid to do them themselves, as they know the result will likely not be up to snuff and their professores and bosses and subscribers might realize that they are “imperfect,” “inexperienced,” or, heaven forbid, “still growing.” And then these young people look around and see that the whole world seems to have given in to generative AI, and they see that if they don’t use AI, they will be outside of the norm.

So resisting AI is a big ask in the eyes of your average young person. As I said to my husband in one of our many recent discussions about detecting AI in student work, if AI isn’t going to be stopped or even slowed in our culture at large, the only way out is to do a better job at educating youth both academically and morally. This is because it is going to take personal moral strength and academic ability to resist inappropriate compromises in an AI-imbued professional world. Each individual will have to make a decision for himself about whether to put authenticity, skill, and personhood before the opportunity for immediate success.

For in truth, AI may in fact be better at shining us up than we are ourselves. It may make fewer mistakes and thus be better at protecting our reputations as excellent communicators than we are. A young person who doesn’t use Grammarly may find that her Substack or report at work or whatever may be passed over in favor of a counterpart’s shiny AI version. A college student who eschews AI may get poor grades due to being compared with students who are dishonestly submitting ChatBot essays. Committing to putting your person into what you create and insisting upon integrity may have a real slowing effect on your career.

After all, without AI, we’re positively Medieval: we feast too loudly and fast too penitentially; we smell like sweat or incense; we are defensive about our guilds; and we’re more than a little grubby.

In other words, we are human. And that is what writing ought to be.

So no, it’s not okay to use Grammarly.