The same fate hit deepl. What most english users don't know is that translation from english to another language was always at best - horrible and not usable without much manual effort. The same goes the other way around when you are writing technical documents.

Deepl however - 7-8 or more years ago was bright star - i do not say this lightly but their translation (i can only vouch for german<->english) was out of this world in comparison to everything else like google translate, yahoo or whatever.

It was basically so good - i just kept writing in english even though its not my first language but its easier for technical documentation and i use it to translate back to german instead of doing it the other way around.

But then, when the first mass hysteria of chatgpt 1 etc hits - it good worse fast - nowadays - it can not do any good translation service at all - it is far worse than what the competition offered 7-8 years ago! It makes no sense a lot of times.

I suspect Google did the same thing with docs. The last time I tried it, about 10% of the suggestions were simply incorrect.

I need to find an old school grammar checker that works on the command line with markdown.

What is Grammarly anymore, even? Is it Superhuman? Is it Fathom? And what are either of those even?

Even before all that, I switched to Quillbot because Grammarly would always mess up the formatting in my emails in gmail (but only when you viewed it from mobile). Quillbot isn't totally better than that, but at least its cheaper.

Grammarly does use AI https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-to-acquire-... since 2025.

Don’t forget that email won’t actually be read on the receiving side either. The recipient will just ask their LLM to summarize it in a few bullets.

But think of how productive you'll be when everyone slops you emails and then you have an agent slop you a summary of all the slops you got slopped into your slop box!

> but models have become increasingly good at writing.

That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.

I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.

They are losing because they embraced AI at the detriment of what they where doing well.

It was a good tool, that worked, paid for it for a couple of months and then they decided to go with AI and using my writing for training.

I suspect they're also losing a lot of university subscriptions after they started advertising how they offer a service to make LLM-written text look human-written, if I recall correctly they even explicitly advertised that you could use it to cheat. I don't know what they were thinking with that marketing campaign given that universities are probably one of their biggest market segments.

> pre-AI era

That is a very bad shortening for "pre-laymen-take-of-AI". Let us try to keep language clean at least here.

If the product in question replaces a tutor, it is AI ("simulation of intelligence"). We cannot restrict the term "AI" to "giving a broader appearance of intelligence with less trust in the results". Either this is still the "AI era" (post cybernetics, post Dartmouth), or we are not there yet.

Grammarlynis using AI.

Models are not good at writing. Like, they are just not producing good writings. They produce differently bad writing.

What are the alternative AI solutions?

Unless you're in country A and ordered from country B (both in Europe), in which case the consumer protection agency from country A may just tell you "well they're not in our country so we can't do much, try contacting the European consumer agency, which after spending 30 minutes finding their form, and checking that you do qualify (which you won't, for some stupid reason like "did you try calling them nicely and sending a letter and waiting for 30 days?"), they will just say "ok cool we sent them an e-mail, we'll tell you how all of this will work out".

Or maybe I'm just in a bad European country who pulls this kind of demotivating stints every time I have this kind of problem.

I tried to report Linkedin for their practices and it was like spitting at the sky trying to hit God

Consumer protection applies to individual consumers, not businesses. OP looks like a business.

What are you going to report? There’s nothing illegal going on here.

In the UK that would be trading standards, and unless it's a local shop selling un-taxed cigarettes they're useless.

Good luck actually getting them to do something. Also "Europe" is an entire continent with many different countries and laws, you might want to be more specific.

Lmao no. First press games are a scammer company based in Germany. I reported them to the Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband...nothing.

I reported them to the UKICC and got a reply after like 7 months asking for more information (I'd given them plenty) and that they were very busy and it would probably take another year to look at it. I told them not to bother.

You can use Grammarly via an API, or simply submit text in a web interface.

It's a keylogger in the same way Vim is a keylogger.

Doesn't appear to be what's happening though.

> We let them know we weren't going to renew and they sent these unsolicited emails and popups in their app to all of the users who had licenses

Not "our app".