Superhuman, née Grammarly, is getting sued (paywall) for putting the names of living professionals on output from an AI system which they called “Expert Review”. I first saw this on Pixel Envy, which links to Platformer:
On Friday I learned to my surprise that I had become an editor for Grammarly. The subscription-based writing assistant has introduced a feature named “expert review” that, in the company’s words, “is designed to take your writing to the next level — with insights from leading professionals, authors, and subject-matter experts.”Read a little further, though, and you’ll learn that these “insights” are not actually “from” leading professionals, or any human person at all. Rather, they are AI-generated text, which may or may not reflect whichever “leading professional” Grammarly slapped their names on.
“References to experts in Expert Review are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities,” reads a disclaimer a few hundred words down the support page.
I wasn’t able to check if the feature offered advice from visionary writer Timothy Zahn because it was already shut down by the time I got around to looking at this. I suspect not, however, because Zahn offered the perfect solution to all this backlash back in 1993, in the form of Luuke Skywalker.
As the delightfully-named unofficial fan encyclopedia explains:
Luuke Skywalker was a genetic clone of the Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker, grown from cells extracted from the hand Skywalker lost during his duel with the Dark Lord Darth Vader on Cloud City. Skywalker's hand and lightsaber were recovered by Vader and taken to Emperor Palpatine's Mount Tantiss storehouse on the planet Wayland. In 9 ABY, the insane clone Jedi Master Joruus C'baoth performed a mind trick on Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn's subordinate, Captain Gilad Pellaeon, ordering him to make a special clone for him. The clone that later became Luuke Skywalker was grown in secret from sample B-2332-54, the sorting code assigned to Luke Skywalker's hand. The clone was grown in a Spaarti cloning cylinder over the period of less than a month. When he was ready, the clone was given Jedi training by C'baoth and over time became little more than an extension of C'baoth's will.