Confronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me

Today, I’m talking with Shishir Mehrotra, who is CEO of Superhuman — that’s the company formerly known as Grammarly, which is still its flagship product.

Confronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me

Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra on the difference between attribution and impersonation — and what AI companies should owe creators.

Shishir also used to be the chief product officer at YouTube, and he’s on the board of directors at Spotify. He’s a fascinating guy, and we actually scheduled this interview a month or so ago, thinking we’d talk about AI and what it’s doing to software, platforms, and creativity pretty broadly.

Then things really took a turn. Back in August of last year, Grammarly shipped a feature called Expert Review, which allowed you to get writing suggestions from AI-cloned “experts,” and reporters at *The Verge *and other outlets discovered that those experts included us. It included me.

No one had ever asked permission to use our names this way, and a lot of reporters were outraged by this — the talented investigative journalist Julia Angwin was so upset she filed a class action lawsuit about it. Superhuman responded to this by first offering up an email-based opt out and then killing the feature entirely. Shishir apologized, and you’ll hear him apologize again.

Throughout all of this, I kept wondering if Shishir was still going to show up and record Decoder, because my questions about decision-making and AI and platforms suddenly seemed a lot harder than before. To his credit, he did, and he stuck it out. This conversation got tense at times, and it’s clear we disagree about how extractive AI feels for people. But I won’t stretch this out any longer.

Okay: Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Superhuman. Here we go.

*This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. *

Shishir Mehrotra, you’re the CEO of Superhuman. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

I’m happy you’re here. I’m a little surprised you’re here. I think you know what some of the questions are going to be, but I’m really happy you made it. I have a lot of questions about AI, how people feel about AI, and then a feature you launched in Grammarly, which is one of your products, that made people feel a lot of feelings about AI. So we’re going to get into it.

Let’s start at the start. Superhuman owns Grammarly and Coda. You own a bunch of companies. Just quickly describe the structure of Superhuman and all your products.

Superhuman is the AI native productivity suite. We bring AI to wherever people work. Late last year, we changed the name of our corporate entity from Grammarly to Superhuman. We did that because the scope of what we do has broadened quite a bit. And so in addition to Grammarly, which is everyone’s favorite writing assistant, we now have a document space called Coda, and a very popular email client called Mail.

We launched a new product called Superhuman Go. Go is the platform that brings you a network of proactive and personal AI assistance directly to wherever you work. So for people familiar with Grammarly, you can think about Go as taking that core idea and allowing anybody to write agents that work just like Grammarly does. Your sales agent, your support agent, so on, can all help work with you right where you work.

The core idea is that most AI tools require a big change in behavior. We bring AI where you work. Across our products, we see about a million different apps and agents every day. We seamlessly blend AI right into your experience, so you don’t have to think about AI.

That’s what we’ve been doing with Grammarly for years. And now we are opening that up so anyone can build on that with Superhuman Go.

**You and I hung out a few weeks ago, and one of the things we talked about was the fact that Grammarly, for most people, is expressed as a keyboard. It shows up on your phone and your documents. You spend a lot of time figuring out how to make sure you work with things like Google Docs. **

All of those products are integrating AI in exactly the same way as you’re describing. I think you put AI right next to the insertion point, right next to your cursor. What’s the big differentiation for you?

First off, I think very few of them actually are doing that particularly well. A handful do. But as I mentioned, we see a million unique apps a day. The way to think about Grammarly is it’s your assistant that lives everywhere. You might be in a web app. It could be Gmail, it could be Google Docs, it could be Coda, it could be Notion.

You could be in a desktop app. That could be Apple Notes, that could be Slack, that could be whatever app you’re using. It could be every mobile application. We have, for every one of those applications, figured out the right way to observe what you’re doing, annotate it in a way that is unobtrusive to you and to the application, and to make changes on your behalf. And doing that everywhere is the proposition.

As you jump from tool to tool, there are different types of AI in each one. Most of them actually don’t have that. Like I said, we see a million unique surfaces a day. And the ones that do don’t feel like one integrated experience. That’s why we have about 40 million daily active users and that’s what they use us for.

It feels like the promise there is by looking at all the places you work, your tool will be more intelligent than disparate tools you might encounter in all those places.

Yeah, becoming more intelligent is certainly part of it. For many people, it’s just that one familiar experience that really feels like a virtual human working right next to you.

So is it consistency of experience or is it better and more useful results?

It’s both. The fact that Grammarly is ever present is very important and [it produces] very high-quality grammar results. As we split the product into parts, we said, “We’re going to take the platform layer of Grammarly and we’re going to turn it into a platform.” That’s what we call Go. That’s about allowing other people to create agents and experiences that provide a high-quality experience that we can make ubiquitous for them.

All right. I wanted to understand what you think that the sell of the tools is. I think that’s very important for my next set of questions.

The other thing that I really want to ask is a question I ask everybody, but I think the stakes are a little bit higher here. It’s about decisions. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?

We have a lot of different thoughts on how to make good decisions. I wrote a piece a long time ago called Eigenquestions, which is about framing not only the right solution, but how do you frame the right question? In terms of rituals we use, the most canonical one is something we do called Dory and Pulse, which is a way to solicit feedback and opinions so that you get rid of groupthink in the decision making process.

But those are probably the two that get mentioned the most if you were to ask teams here at Grammarly or previously at Coda or before that when I worked at YouTube or Google, or so on.

**You can see where this is going. Let’s put this into practice. You launched a feature in Grammarly called Expert Review that generated suggestions on how to improve text. It synthesized advice from experts. It used my name among many other names: journalists Casey Newton and Julie Angwin, you can go down the line; bell hooks was in there, which is hilarious in its own way. **

You do not have our permission to use our names to do this. You had little check marks next to the name that indicated it was somehow official. People did not like this, I did not like this, and you removed the feature. Tell me about the decision to launch this feature with names you didn’t have permission for and the decision to unlaunch the feature.

I expected we’d talk a bit about this, so I have lots of different thoughts on it.

First off, I’d say I under