Comment by meerita
4 days ago
Grammarly was a great idea in the pre-AI era. Now I bet they're losing a lot with so many AI solutions that are better integrated across every ecosystem.
Some people will argue that Grammarly still has a better suggestion system, but models have become increasingly good at writing. I think this product and its revenue model will become obsolete pretty soon.
> but models have become increasingly good at writing.
That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.
I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.
HN readers are not average people. elsewhere i see people using AI to write without any blowback. maybe they don't want to ruffle feathers, but they are engaging, whereas i prefer to just skip over AI generated posts.
What about just labeling you silently as useless? How do you know that this doesn't happen?
3 replies →
Not my experience at all on non-technical online spaces. For example, people try posting AI garbage on sports message boards and everyone dunks on them for posting slop.
These spaces are filled with people barely technically literate enough to post and AI is still viewed very negatively
If you build a nice writing guideline, you can impersonate Mark Twain if you want with any model.
They are losing because they embraced AI at the detriment of what they where doing well.
It was a good tool, that worked, paid for it for a couple of months and then they decided to go with AI and using my writing for training.
I suspect they're also losing a lot of university subscriptions after they started advertising how they offer a service to make LLM-written text look human-written, if I recall correctly they even explicitly advertised that you could use it to cheat. I don't know what they were thinking with that marketing campaign given that universities are probably one of their biggest market segments.
> pre-AI era
That is a very bad shortening for "pre-laymen-take-of-AI". Let us try to keep language clean at least here.
If the product in question replaces a tutor, it is AI ("simulation of intelligence"). We cannot restrict the term "AI" to "giving a broader appearance of intelligence with less trust in the results". Either this is still the "AI era" (post cybernetics, post Dartmouth), or we are not there yet.
pre-slop era might be a fitting term
Grammarlynis using AI.
Models are not good at writing. Like, they are just not producing good writings. They produce differently bad writing.
What are the alternative AI solutions?
All the LLMs. Both commercial and open. If you know how to setup the style, rules, you can outmatch any Grammarly setting.