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Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel

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bluebxrry · 1790157857 · focus · HN ↗
I loved Grammarly. But it has changed post LLM boom. The underlying concept was awesome as they take grammatical rules from a book of english grammar rules into a linter. Then it let you select the tone and adjusted some for marketing/engagement so it sounds good on Twitter. I have severe dyslexia and struggled with tone.
Lately, like following ChatGPT 3.5 release era, I had found Grammarly now replacing entire sentences with LLM replacement which are random and inject bias to being near useless. It did this some before. The problem is I can't even tell if it's defensible from a grammatical point when it uses an LLM to do this. At some point Grammarly reached too far in the cookie jar and I no longer trusted that someone who read the Grammar rule book verified any part of the elaborate suggestions.
I haven't logged in for months. I guess I was no longer learning from it. I need to take a closer look but sys admin outrage from pushy sales people doesn't bode well in my mind.
1. MacNCheese23 · 1790192004 · focus · HN ↗
  The same fate hit deepl. What most english users don't know is that translation from english to another language was always at best - horrible and not usable without much manual effort. The same goes the other way around when you are writing technical documents.
  Deepl however - 7-8 or more years ago was bright star - i do not say this lightly but their translation (i can only vouch for german<->english) was out of this world in comparison to everything else like google translate, yahoo or whatever.
  It was basically so good - i just kept writing in english even though its not my first language but its easier for technical documentation and i use it to translate back to german instead of doing it the other way around.
  But then, when the first mass hysteria of chatgpt 1 etc hits - it good worse fast - nowadays - it can not do any good translation service at all - it is far worse than what the competition offered 7-8 years ago! It makes no sense a lot of times.
  1. paimapi · 1790194352 · focus · HN ↗
    Looks like approx 7 years ago was DeepL's first Series A - <a href="https://tracxn.com/d/companies/deepl/__mTFDDSjOlFbUE5DY_w1NWY3gI5ttRRBOXtV7p6GCqJE/funding-and-investors" rel="nofollow">https://tracxn.com/d/companies/deepl/__mTFDDSjOlFbUE5DY_w1NW... - they got funding from btov and Benchmark
    Benchmark is very AI-pilled: <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-is-replacing-jobs-in-these-two-fields-benchmark-vc-says/490091" rel="nofollow">https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-is-replacing-j... and is very bullish on it, too: <a href="https://gtmnow.com/benchmark-ai-startup-investing-chetan-puttagunta/" rel="nofollow">https://gtmnow.com/benchmark-ai-startup-investing-chetan-put...
    it also looks like DeepL went from using a CNN engine to an LLM in 2024 (coinciding with its $2 billion valuation and Series C) which is likely why it seems to hallucinate a lot more now: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator#Translation_method" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator#Translation_m...

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