When is an apology not an apology? When it comes from an AI boss with an out-of-control chatbot; The Guardian, July 24, 2026

 Marina Hyde, The Guardian; When is an apology not an apology? When it comes from an AI boss with an out-of-control chatbot

"Throughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet. A crow on the battlefield. A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, attached to a news story. You know it’s not going to be good, right? You know that by the time you’ve read it, you’ll be begging to go back to the time when the worst thing that could happen to us at the hands of the techlords was just some democracy-subversion, or childhood destruction, usually followed by Mark Zuckerberg putting on a suit and claiming: “We will learn from this.”"

What Was Grammarly Thinking?; The Atlantic, March 12, 2026

 Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic ; What Was Grammarly Thinking?

A short-lived AI tool promised to help users write like the greats—and a bunch of other random people, including me.

"But in the age of generative AI, there are many new kinds of copying. For instance, Wired reported last week on a tool offered by Grammarly, which briefly offered users the opportunity to put their writing through something called “Expert Review.” This produced AI-generated advice purportedly from the perspective of a bunch of famous authors, a bunch of less-famous working journalists (including myself, per The Verge’s reporting), and a bunch of academics (including some who had recently died).

I say “briefly” because the company deactivated the feature today. A lot of people got really mad about it because none of the experts had agreed for their work to be used in such a way, or to serve as uncompensated marketing for an app that people use to help them write more legible emails. “We hear the feedback and recognize we fell short on this,” the company’s CEO, Shishir Mehrotra, wrote on his LinkedIn page yesterday. Not long after, Wired reported that one of the journalists whose name had been used in the feature, Julia Angwin, was filing a class-action lawsuit against Grammarly’s owner, Superhuman Platform. In a statement forwarded by a spokesperson, Mehrotra repeated apologies made in his LinkedIn post and added, "We have reviewed the lawsuit, and we believe the legal claims are without merit and will strongly defend against them.”...

Now that I’ve looked more closely at this not-very-useful feature, and now that it’s shut down, the whole situation seems a little absurd. This was just a weird and inappropriate thing that a company tried to do to make money without putting in very much effort. The primary reason it became a news story at all was that it touched on widespread anxiety about whose work is worth what, whose skills will continue to be marketable in the age of AI, and whether any of us are really as complex, singular, and impossible-to-imitate as we might hope we are."