Grammarly Introduces New Interface and New AI Tools
If you use Grammarly to check your spelling and grammar, you will notice some changes.
That’s because Grammarly is introducing a refreshed interface today for both free and paid users. The first change you’ll immediately notice is the new user interface, “Documents,” Grammarly’s new take on a word processor. (The company calls it an “AI workspace.”) As before, you can use rich text (bold, italics, and underlines), headings, and lists, but as TechCrunch notes , the new interface works with blocks. You can add new blocks for rich text, as well as blocks for adding things like dividers, columns, and tables. I’m guessing if you’ve used WordPress, this setup will be familiar to you.
You’ll also notice AI Chat in the Docs sidebar, which works like a traditional AI-powered chatbot. You can use it to request AI help without leaving the app. But beyond that, Grammarly is rolling out new AI features to its writing tool, namely AI agents. AI agents are designed to automate your tasks, and in this case, Grammarly wants its agents to help writers, especially students and teachers, with a wide range of issues. This update will launch eight agents that are responsible for the following:
-
Reader Reaction : Identifies the target audience for your work and anticipates questions or concerns they may have about your current draft.
-
AI Grader : This agent allows you to add information about your school work so it can give advice and grade you before you turn in the assignment.
-
Citation Finder : Not only does this agent generate citations for you, Grammarly claims that it can find evidence to support or refute claims in your work.
-
Peer Review : This agent adds “subject matter expertise” to improve your work and bring it up to certain academic standards.
-
Proofreader : This is more like Grammarly’s traditional approach, offering line-by-line advice on how to improve your writing,
-
AI Detector : This agent provides an assessment of whether a given text is human-written or AI-generated.
-
Plagiarism checker : compares your text against “massive databases” of texts to determine if you are infringing on someone else’s copyrighted work.
-
Paraphraser : This agent can rework your text to give it a certain tone.
While these tools are available to all writers, Grammarly seems to be aiming to make these updates educationally focused. The company believes that students can use AI tools to improve their writing, especially in line with the expectations of their target audience — a teacher or professor, for example. The company, in turn, wants teachers to use tools like AI Detector to identify students who may be overly reliant on AI tools. In Grammarly’s world, students and teachers can use AI for good, not for cheating.
Like many AI tools, the advertised experience sounds great: Grammarly’s new AI interface makes it look like eight experts are working on any given writing task. But the reality may be different. AI-powered plagiarism detectors, for example, are less reliable than many people assume . (These tools, I’ve learned, almost entirely wrote the U.S. Constitution using AI.) Grammarly’s VP of enterprise products told TechCrunch the same thing about its AI Detector agent, though he says his agent is more accurate than any other product, and there’s evidence that the tools are getting better overall .
I’m also concerned about the quality and accuracy of other tools. Reader Reactions relies on “publicly available” information about a particular professor. If a group of students followed AI advice generated from the same data set about that professor, would the end results sound the same? The AI also hallucinates , sometimes completely making up information — would students spend time checking generations of Citation Finder to make sure some sources weren’t bogus?
I understand Grammarly’s mission: AI is here to stay, and students are increasingly using it in ways that may not necessarily help them learn . Instead of trying to ban AI, why not use the technology in ways that benefit everyone involved? I understand that Grammarly isn’t offering students a way to create entire paragraphs (or essays), but rather is using AI to work on existing work. But we also need to be mindful of the limitations of these tools, which are often overlooked amid all the hype around AI.