A natural language AI writing assistant is the latest in Grammarly’s attempts to help with professional writing.
Generative artificial intelligence has been steadily moving into the mainstream. Media companies must now be on the lookout for AI-generated submissions or AI-facilitated plagiarism. The latest public adopter of AI is Grammarly, which provides spelling and grammar checks and suggested wording for blog posts and other content.
SEE: Find out how to streamline business operations with this AI eBook bundle (TechRepublic Academy)
The new product, called GrammarlyGo, was announced on Thursday and will be available to some users in beta in April. Specifically, this applies to:
- Grammarly free plan users in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, Poland, and Ukraine.
- Grammarly Premium, Grammarly Business and Grammarly for Education subscribers.
- Developers using the Grammarly Text Editor SDK.
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What is GrammarlyGo?
GrammarlyGo’s AI is a blend of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and proprietary AI and machine learning models. Grammarly has not decided on a final release partner for its service, Grammarly told TechRepublic in an email interview.
“As we continue to find new ways to deepen the value we deliver to our clients, we will continue to experiment with the latest LLM (large language model) advancements and technologies, including those we build in-house,” Grammarly said.
The GPT-3 text and chat AI platform has become a household name due to media coverage, word of mouth, and partnerships with Google.
While generative artificial intelligence can create comprehensible prose based on a message, natural language AI is designed to carry on a real-time conversation with a person as if they were speaking with another human being. GrammarlyGo is the first.
GrammarlyGo Demos Writing Corporate Reports and Emails
Grammarly has been applying its internal AI to written content along with its grammar suggestions. The big change is that with generative AI, users can enter prompts like “Give me an outline for a project brief” to get a seemingly original text result. Grammarly uses job descriptions and the short project example to show this, and claims it can help workers “save time, improve their creativity, and get more done.”
In addition to receiving prompts, GrammarlyGo asks users to choose their desired “formality”, tone and “profession”. From there, it spits out the natural language type response. After the AI makes its first attempt, the user can further “enhance”, “shorten”, or “simplify” the content. Tones range from “direct” to “empathetic.”
Also, GrammarlyGo is designed to help write emails and long documents. Many of the examples show communication between people in the same organization, but there’s nothing to stop internal writers from also using GrammarlyGo to write blog posts or public marketing materials.
AI requires a human to be aware to edit the information to make sure it is accurate. For a manager who decides to allow or instruct employees to use this Grammarly feature, it may be a matter of balancing short-term efficiency with potential long-term errors.
The search results written by ChatGPT are full of factual errors, as the AI focuses on putting words together in a coherent and natural order, not on checking those words. So, for example, a potential employee might come to a job interview with the wrong ideas about a role if AI is brought in early in the hiring process and not checked for accuracy by any humans.
Grammarly positions GrammarlyGo as an attempt to capture an end-to-end experience that could broaden its domain over content creation work, with the goal of going “beyond the editing stage to help our users throughout the entire communication life cycle, including conception and composition”.
Companies should consider implementing policies for the use of AI like this one that cover details like: Who should use it? When? How much human supervision does it require?
SEE: Artificial Intelligence Ethics Policy (Tech Republic Premium)
Ethics policies can also be helpful, both in terms of what AI is allowed to say and how much human oversight it receives. Some organizations may wish to put in writing who is responsible for potential damage caused by AI-generated text and how damage can be handled.
How Grammarly addresses security and compliance concerns
Grammarly stressed that its product is private and does not log keystrokes or sell data. Some fields, such as birthdays and payment information, prevent Grammarly from seeing them. On the security side, Grammarly stays up to date with GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and other location-based security requirements.
The company noted that GrammarlyGo is disabled in the default panel and won’t be available to K-12 schools with Grammarly partnerships, so don’t expect AI-written essays from pre-college students, at least not from this particular service. .
SEE: ChatGPT Powers Salesforce Einstein AI (Technological Republic)
