Confronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me
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What controversy surrounds the AI feature launched by Grammarly?
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How did Shishir Mehrotra respond to the backlash from experts?
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What is the significance of the class action lawsuit mentioned?
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Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Shashir Mohotra, the CEO of Superhuman. That's the company formerly known as Grammarly, which is still its flagship product. Shashir 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 broadly about AI and what it's doing to software, platforms, and creativity. Then things took a turn. There's a feature in Grammarly called Expert Review, which allows people to get AI writing suggestions from quote-unquote experts.
And reporters at The Verge and other outlets discovered that those experts included us. And included me. No one had ever asked us permission to use our names in this way. And a lot of reporters and other authors were outraged by this. The talented investigative journalist Julie Angwin was so upset, she filed a class action lawsuit. Superhuman responded to all this controversy by first offering up an email-based opt-out and then killing the feature entirely. Jashira apologized, and you'll hear him apologize again in this conversation. We'll put links to all this backstory in the show notes if you really want to dive in. Throughout all of this, the Decoder team and I kept wondering if Shashir was still going to show up and do an interview, because my questions about decision-making and AI and platforms suddenly seemed a lot harder than before.
How does Superhuman differentiate itself in the AI productivity space?
To his credit, he showed up and he stuck it out for the entire conversation, which got tense at times. It's clear that Shashir and I disagree about how extractive AI feels for people and the value that these platforms can actually provide. I'm not going to stretch this out any longer. I'm dying for you to listen to this and I'm dying for your feedback. We really do read all the emails. Here's Shashir Mahotra, CEO of Superhuman. Here we go.
Shashir 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, you own Coda, you own a bunch of companies. Just quickly describe the structure of Superhuman and all your products.
Oh yeah, sure. So Superhuman is the AI native productivity suite.
What are the implications of AI on content creation and authorship?
We bring AI to wherever people work. Late last year, we changed the name of our corporate entity from Grammarly to Superhuman. I did that the scope of what we do 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, a very popular email client called Mail, and 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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What controversy surrounds the AI feature launched by Grammarly?
0:00–0:19
2
How did Shishir Mehrotra respond to the backlash from experts?
0:19–0:55
3
What is the significance of the class action lawsuit mentioned?
0:55–2:25
4
How does Superhuman differentiate itself in the AI productivity space?
2:25–3:34
5
What are the implications of AI on content creation and authorship?
3:34–5:14
6
How does Shishir Mehrotra view the future of AI and creativity?
5:14–6:59
7
What business models are emerging for creators in the age of AI?
6:59–8:28
8
What vision does Shishir have for the future of Superhuman?
8:28–1:22:05
Speakers
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