Comment by uoaei

5 years ago

Isn't it plainly obvious that they take all your inputs and feed it to their models?

Isn't that literally the point of Grammarly?

5 comments

uoaei

Reply
rpdillon  5 years ago

I think it's more a case where many users only see one side of a dual-use technology...they don't necessarily even know how it works, just that they can install it and it checks grammar for them. It seems a bit like visiting the local dump for the first time as a kid: the sheer amount of stuff being collected in one place that came from everyone's homes can be really impressive, even though you knew all along that it had to go somewhere every time you took out the trash.

duxup  5 years ago

For some of us it is something we might think is likely.

I don't think it is that obvious / people would know that outright.

Consultant32452  5 years ago

It's not obvious (to me) that all the "thinking" is done in the cloud. I would've assumed it was all local to your machine.

  • uoaei  5 years ago

    Is it a native app, an Electron app, or a webapp? I don't even know because I refuse to get anywhere near it.

    If either of the last two, it seems inevitable that their engineers would push as much of the compute server-side as possible to retain fidelity at the keystroke level.

    We really should be doing a better job about demonstrating the distinctions between locally-run and -hosted tools, and cloud tools, for novices and laypeople.

    Back when Facebook started pushing everything server-side it was a pretty obvious change if you were on a bad connection. When you'd type in a form on a bad connection it would often re-populate text that you had just deleted, or move the cursor around to unexpected places, presumably to match back up between their server-side caches and the local state. In the early days my adblock was interfering with this, too, which made the issue more apparent and caused some very strange behavior.