Grammarly turned writers into “AI editors” without consent — class action filed

Investigative journalist Julia Angwin filed a class action lawsuit against Grammarly, accusing the company of illegally using authors' works to train AI tools. According to the plaintiffs, the service was converting professional writers into so-called "AI editors" without their knowledge or consent — thereby violating their rights to privacy and publicity. The crux of the claim is as follows: Grammarly was collecting texts from its users, including professional journalists and writers, and using them to train automatic editing algorithms.

Essentially, the AI was learning to work with text in the same way that human authors do — by analyzing their decisions, style, and edits. Meanwhile, users were offered no notification, no request for consent, and no compensation whatsoever. The lawsuit is built on two legal grounds: violation of the right to privacy and violation of the right of publicity.

The latter protects a person from commercial use of their personality, style, or reputation without explicit permission. Julia Angwin is a renowned American journalist, recipient of numerous professional awards, and founder of The Markup, a publication that specializes in investigations about technology, data, and corporate surveillance. Her book "Dragnet Nation" became one of the defining texts of the digital privacy era.

Angwin serves as the lead plaintiff in the class action. Behind her could stand thousands of other Grammarly users — all professional authors whose texts may have been used in a similar manner without their knowledge. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in the United States.

The plaintiffs are seeking not only damages but also an injunction against further use of author data without explicit consent, as well as full transparency regarding which materials were used to train the company's AI models. If the class action is granted the appropriate status, it could cover hundreds of thousands of service users worldwide who never consented to having their texts used for such purposes. Grammarly is one of the most popular text-processing AI tools in the world: more than 30 million users rely on it for grammar checking, style improvement, and content generation.

The service is actively promoted to journalists, writers, and professional editors, which makes the plaintiffs' claims particularly damaging to the company's reputation. In recent years, Grammarly has aggressively developed AI features, integrating large language models — it is precisely this expansion that has drawn the plaintiffs' attention. The case fits into a broader wave of lawsuits against technology companies accused of unauthorized use of content to train AI.

Similar claims have been brought against OpenAI, Stability AI, GitHub Copilot, Meta, and several other players. However, the lawsuit against Grammarly has a distinctive focus: it is not simply about content reproduction, but about appropriation of the editorial style of specific authors — that is, commercial use of their professional identity. The legal theory here is non-trivial.

The right of publicity has historically been applied to celebrities — protecting names, faces, and voices from commercial exploitation without consent. But in the era of generative AI, lawyers are beginning to expand this concept: if a model learns to imitate authorial style, is this not use of that person's intangible asset? If AI is sold as a tool that "edits like a professional," at whose expense is this competence built?

The court's answer to these questions will set a precedent for the entire industry. For authors and journalists, the signal is clear: consent to data processing in user agreements is not the same as permission to use your professional style as training material for AI products. Every time an author accepts a suggestion from an AI tool, they may be contributing to a system that will eventually replace them.

The boundary between "a tool you use" and "data that exploits you" is becoming ever thinner.