Grammarly, the widely used AI-powered writing assistance platform, is facing a growing backlash from the global academic community after users discovered that one of its newest tools generates manuscript feedback under the names of real scholars, including some who have already died.
The controversy erupted this week after Verena Krebs, a medieval historian at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, shared a screenshot showing that the feature, called “Expert Review,” was offering artificial intelligence (AI) versions of multiple academics as manuscript reviewers, among them historian David Abulafia, who died in January 2026. The screenshot spread rapidly across academic networks on Bluesky and LinkedIn, drawing condemnation from scholars around the world.
Kathleen Alves, an associate professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY), captured the mood of many in the academic community when she wrote that the feature amounted to “literally digital necromancy.” Hisham Zerriffi, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, echoed the sentiment, calling the product “NecromancerLLM” and stating that the practice was wrong whether the scholars in question were alive or dead.
Grammarly describes Expert Review as a tool that helps writers “meet the expectations of your discipline and your project by drawing on insights from subject matter experts and trusted publications.” Users open a document, select a scholar from a list, and receive AI-generated editing suggestions modelled on that academic’s published research and writing style. The system can also automatically rewrite passages of a manuscript in line with the suggestions it generates.
The central concern raised by critics is one of consent. Vanessa Heggie, an associate professor at the University of Birmingham, wrote that the platform was building what she described as small large language models (LLMs) based on scraped scholarly work and then attaching real names and professional reputations to the output, without any explicit permission from the academics involved.
The Expert Review tool is not the only Grammarly feature drawing scrutiny. The company has also introduced what it calls an AI Grader agent, which generates personalised feedback on student assignments by searching publicly available information about the student’s instructor. Critics warn that this approach could encourage students to reverse-engineer their writing to match an algorithm’s prediction of a specific professor’s preferences, rather than improving the quality of their ideas and arguments.
The backlash reflects a broader unease within universities over how quickly technology companies are embedding AI tools into academic workflows, and how slowly institutional policies have moved to keep pace. Many universities currently permit AI assistance for grammar and editing while prohibiting AI-generated content, a distinction that becomes increasingly difficult to enforce as platforms like Grammarly expand their generative capabilities.
Grammarly had not issued a public response to the controversy at the time of publication.
