An open letter to Grammarly and other plagiarists, thieves and slop merchants (writer/critic/reporter Maureen Ryan)

[highplainsdem]

She originally posted this March 10. I saw it today only because she reposted it with a Bluesky thread I'll copy below this excerpt from the open letter.

Wikipedia page on Maureen Ryan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Ryan

And if you don't already know why writers are mad at Grammarly, see this: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143630840

The letter:

https://www.moryan.com/an-open-letter-to-grammarly-and-other-plagiarists-thieves-and-slop-merchants/

-snip-

You should be ashamed of where you work. Not just Grammarly or Superhuman or whatever comically dumb name you come up with next. Almost everyone running tech firms, most people in positions of responsibility, pretty much every C-suite type — congrats, you’re all making the world a worse place. People used to be excited about tech, now they dread what data you're going to steal next, they dread what violation of privacy or the environment will turn up next. There are people in tech who want to do good, but they’re consistently outvoted or stampeded by selfish hucksters and thieves. What the vast majority of those with power are doing or enabling is shamefully disrespectful and destructive. Everyone hyping and shilling for all this? You shouldn’t be proud of making people dumber or stealing from people. Because LLMs and the whole AI hype machine — it’s just idiocy, plagiarism, greed and theft on a grand scale.

These plagiarism machines simply regurgitate what has been fed into them. They are not capable of true art, real creativity, the kind of structure, nuance and depth that are the hallmarks of worthy acts of creativity. These slop machines are wrong a lot of the time, they encourage people to do terrible things, and they are simply bad for the world. I feel sad for anyone who uses them, because they’re degrading the human condition — the ability to know and care and understand. All this theft, stupidity and degradation is not only bad and harmful — it's unnecessary.

Because actual writers and artists and creative folks are right here! All we want is baseline respect and reasonable compensation. But the snake-oil salespeople pushing these hallucinating plagiarism machines on the rest of us think any compensation is too much! The executives ruining human discourse and the planet – they must be lavishly paid. Actual creators — we get exactly nothing. No money, no respect, no consent.

-snippjng a short paragraph saying FU to the AI companies-

You are wrecking the environment so that terrible people who make bad decisions can be enriched. You are destroying entire fields of creativity so that unsuspecting people can get bad information and “advice” from inaccurate, dumbly predictive slop machines. You are degrading the human condition. You are making the world a worse place.

-snip-

Amen.

Much more at the link above. Please read all of it - it's a great and very righteous rant.

Her thread today on Bluesky:

Props to Nilay for doing this work. Also posting this again, because Grammarly & so many companies & LLM-pilled techies built whole business models around ignoring consent & stealing shit & I don't like it. Grammarly stopped Expert Review but the gross mindsets remain www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...

— Mo Ryan (@moryan.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T14:25:15.603Z

Tech when I was a Young: "We're going to connect all of us to a ton of cool communities & info & games & music & hobbies & it's gonna be awesome"
Tech now: "We're going to steal your shit & kill every creative profession & surveil you & help the police state & YOU HAD BETTER LIKE IT you dumb poors"

— Mo Ryan (@moryan.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T14:32:29.991Z

Also a thing I think about a lot is the culture at these companies where the entire business model is built around ignoring, circumventing or minimizing consent. Gleefully so. Not that tech had the best rep for company cultures before, but whew. Now I worry about the industry's workers even more.

— Mo Ryan (@moryan.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T14:34:04.799Z

Will add, there are great people in tech. Like there are great people in Hollywood, truly awesome people. And I'm sorry way too many of them work for arrogant chodes who only care about lining their pockets and care zero about making the world or their industries worse.

— Mo Ryan (@moryan.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T14:36:01.153Z

If someone broke into a CEO‘s house and trashed the house and took all their valuables, all that breaker-in would have to do is say, “I under delivered for you and you can opt out of future thefts, SORRY I tried to do you a *favor*” — yes, that’s how the world works and it’s actually great! 🙌🏻

— Mo Ryan (@moryan.bsky.social) 2026-03-23T16:20:42.804Z

[Blue Owl]

1. K&R

The sooner we as a society REJECT this shit, THE BETTER

[highplainsdem]

3. Agree completely. It's already done more damage in a few years than I'd've thought possible in 2022.

[cachukis]

2. Thanks.

[highplainsdem]

4. You're welcome! I loved finding this, because what she wrote is so true, and I hope everyone will

read the complete letter.

[cachukis]

5. Very worried about the dark side.

[highplainsdem]

6. We just have to fight it. Not accept that genAI and all the harm it creates will be our inevitable

future.

We have to value humanity and what real artists create, not AI plagiarism and fraud and slop, with AI bros and authoritarian politicians controlling everything.

[cachukis]

7. I too am an idealist in spirit, but old enough to

contend with the forces of reality.
I have been in conversations with very bright youngsters in my family presenting the loss of the ideas that got them there, to the fact that perspective is lost on them.
My youngest son is nearing 40 and works everyday with algorithmic search engines to answer questions in high level legal matters.
He realizes my arguments, but recognizes the inevitability of AI. He worries it will steal his brain and replace his children.
I saw it in 2007 with the smart phone in my classrooms.
Only twenty percent of us know what is happening and worry we won't be enough.
The brilliance of scientific solutions will be sold, justifiably, day after day. The cigarette companies used that same technique.
I truly appreciate your fight and your informative posts.
Money doesn't care how they make it.
I write ala T.S. Eliot.
Nobody even knows.
I am more Luddite. Not against technological advance, but inclusion of humanity is a must.
This technological advance is designed to turn it over to the technology.
That scares the shit out of me.

[highplainsdem]

9. I like the way you write, and your being an idealist. The future can still be shaped, and we don't have

to accept it being controlled by Musk and Thiel and other lunatics who were amusing when parodied in Mountainhead last year, but have to be stopped from destroying the world.

I wish we didn't face this challenge. Trump is bad enough, without genAI and the tech bros.

When I first got online 40 years ago, spending a couple of years moderating a forum focused on high tech and ethics and weapons and politics, it was a smaller online world and I brought in a new friend who was a spokesman for a group of scientists concerned with ethics (not UCS though he became friends with their head), and we were positioned to debate the issues with someone on the other side who was rather prominent, and who hated losing debates. These debates are about basic ethical issues, and that's especially important when the technology being pushed is flawed - as it was then, too. Because people recognized those flaws, those reckless tech plans didn't come to fruition.

That was a long time ago. My old friend and comod is gone now, sadly, much too young. I would have loved to hear what he'd have had to say about genAI. It would have been colorful as well as passionate. He could get really angry about people and groups who were unethical.

I'd rather be spending more time now with musician friends than worrying about crazy AI bros and Trump. Back in 2022 I felt quite certain Biden would be reelected, and I hadn't heard of ChatGPT. But suddenly genAI emerged as a threat, and somehow Trump got elected again, and here we are.

I hope your youngest son stops viewing AI as inevitable. GenAI is inherently flawed, and there's no path from hallucinating chatbots to real AGI, let alone ASI. It can still cause a lot of problems, from deliberate or unintentional misinformation to flawed code being used way too many places. But I still expect the hype to die down and some sanity to return. The artists and teachers opposing genAI haven't given up, and I don't think they will.

[hunter]

8. Using Imitation Intelligence makes you an imitation artist, musician, writer, lawyer, etc..

There's no such thing as Artificial Intelligence.

The conclusion of this article is spot-on.

[highplainsdem]

10. I agree, and I'm glad you like what she wrote. I'm glad I found it. She's very blunt, but when you're

dealing with AI bros happy to steal the world's intellectual property and do tremendous harm with the flawed tech they developed, it would be a mistake to pretend that genAI isn't "just idiocy, plagiarism, greed and theft on a grand scale."