Comment by bluebxrry
4 days ago
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.
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.
Looks like approx 7 years ago was DeepL's first Series A - https://tracxn.com/d/companies/deepl/__mTFDDSjOlFbUE5DY_w1NW... - they got funding from btov and Benchmark
Benchmark is very AI-pilled: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-is-replacing-j... and is very bullish on it, too: 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator#Translation_m...
I suspect Google did the same thing with docs. The last time I tried it, about 10% of the suggestions were simply incorrect.
I need to find an old school grammar checker that works on the command line with markdown.
> I need to find an old school grammar checker that works on the command line with markdown.
You might be interested in Val - https://docs.vale.sh/
What is Grammarly anymore, even? Is it Superhuman? Is it Fathom? And what are either of those even?
Even before all that, I switched to Quillbot because Grammarly would always mess up the formatting in my emails in gmail (but only when you viewed it from mobile). Quillbot isn't totally better than that, but at least its cheaper.