“There are things known and there are things unknown and in between are the doors of perception.” — Aldous Huxley

I’m Huxley Westemeier (26’) and welcome to “The Sift,” a weekly opinions column focused on the impacts and implications of new technologies.

______________________________________________________

It’s the first week of February, which means the junior U.S. History Research Paper is finally due. The past two weeks have been filled with frantic rewriting and peer reviewing focused on assembling the best final version possible.

Like many of my classmates, I ran an edited version of my paper through perhaps the most innocent software tool: Grammarly. Where’s the harm in that? It will help find any grammar mistakes I might have made, right?

Grammarly is supposed to be the ultimate writing companion. It understands Chicago formatting guidelines, which should (theoretically) allow it to recognize footnotes and catch any potentially plagiarized sections. Grammarly markets itself as a “Responsible AI that ensures your writing and reputation shine” on its official website.

Trust me- it’s anything but responsible.

I installed Grammarly in May 2024 while working on my World History II Research Paper, expecting a glorified expansion on Google’s grammar check within Google Doc documents. It was okay at detecting potential style issues, such as passive voice, but showed little understanding of word context. For every paper that I’ve submitted containing quotes, Grammarly edits the content WITHIN the quote. Take, for example, the Aldous Huxley quote at the beginning of every SIFT article. Every single time I paste it in, Grammarly wants me to add commas in random places. As a computer scientist myself, I find this unacceptable. The software knows it’s a quote from Aldous Huxley. When I run the plagiarism checker, it states the source of the quote. But it doesn’t have enough AI smarts to not edit the grammar within existing quotations.

I think focusing on what Grammarly represents in 2025 is crucial. We’re in an era of AI chatbots that have the potential to effectively strip away human creativity and personal style from writing an essay. I do feel that spell-checking and/or other grammar features can be helpful, specifically for people who might not be as familiar with the structural complexities of the English language. Accepting Grammarly as an invaluable tool as a whole worries me.

Looking through Grammarly’s comments might help catch minor errors if someone has an edited paper draft, but going through and blindly accepting all of the suggestions might lead to AI-related hallucinations. (In that last sentence, Grammarly thought it would be appropriate to change the word ‘blindly’ to ‘unthinkingly’- a substitution that doesn’t make sense or flow nicely.)

Grammarly will also sometimes leave commas in the middle of words, change the tenses of verbs within a sentence without considering the overall tense of the paper, and even delete entire paragraphs accidentally (believe me, it’s happened multiple times).

Perhaps most importantly, it might also completely disrupt your writing style. Everyone is unique in their writing, and that’s part of what makes us human and not just an AI. Incorporating features such as Grammarly’s tone analysis that detects the style you’re trying to write in makes it challenging to remain honest with yourself.

For now, I’ll be uninstalling Grammarly and resorting to the old-fashioned technique of reading my work aloud. What will you choose to do?

NOTE: due to the 5-day scheduled break, The Sift will publish again on Feb. 21.