Journalist Julia Angwin filed a class-action lawsuit against Grammarly on Wednesday, alleging the company used real people's names and professional identities to power its "Expert Review" AI feature without ever asking permission.
The feature, which has been live for months, presents AI-generated writing suggestions as if they come from credentialed human experts. According to the complaint, Grammarly attached real journalists' and professionals' names and likenesses to automated feedback those people never wrote and never approved. Angwin's suit claims the company violated rights to publicity and identity by mining real credentials to make its AI output look more trustworthy.
This is a pattern we keep seeing in AI products: companies training on or attributing to real people's work without consent, then waiting to see if anyone notices. Grammarly's version is particularly brazen because it did not just use people's writing as training data. It actively displayed their names next to AI-generated content, creating the impression of a human endorsement that never happened.
For Grammarly's 30+ million daily users, the practical question is whether those "expert" suggestions were ever meaningfully different from standard AI completions. If the expert branding was cosmetic, this lawsuit could force Grammarly to either build a real expert review pipeline or drop the feature entirely.
The case also sets a marker for every AI company bolting "human expert" labels onto automated features. If Angwin's suit gains traction, expect other professionals to start auditing where their names show up in AI products they never agreed to participate in.