Confronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neilai Pittel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Shashir Mahotra, 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.

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