Dr. Verena Krebs

They’re really doing this, yeah

a baby is running through a doorway with the word oops written on the floor . ALT: a baby is running through a doorway with the word oops written on the floor .

When Vanessa Heggie posted about it on LinkedIn she cropped the screenshot to focus on the "expert review" section; I guess it took on a life of its own after that. I'm actually glad b/c the v rough draft visible in my original post was just that; the wordsmith in me got anxious abt it making rounds

kim kardashian is wearing a pink velvet dress and gloves and says i 'm an influencer ALT: kim kardashian is wearing a pink velvet dress and gloves and says i 'm an influencer

Sweet baby Jesus, way to lean into it Grammarly, although rebranding as "Superhuman" was kind of a giveaway I guess.

Also ... I see a direct through-line between this article and my complaint-into-the-void (though the perpetual lurker in me is glad all references to my original post was cut) lol.

I'm so sorry to hear that, and it's terrible that this is also a very valid feat in the first place.

What a ghoulish feature. I've made my peace with my writings having been used as training data without my consent, but this is really on another level.

... on e.g. late medieval cultural contacts between Christian Ethiopia and Europe, they'd in all likelihood be chatting with... me (I've published a lot on this, including a widely-received book).

So depending on your father's research focus, I think it's entirely possible, but hard to check. 2/2

... by using a ca. 1400CE merchant's Latin itinerary. So it's about things travelling from one cultural context to another (hence: Flood), across the Med (hence: Abulafia), using trade routes (Wickham). Not sure why it suggested Cronon, but my guess is: if someone was writing a paper ... 1.5/2

My fear is that it's hard to check; the suggestions seem to be tailored to the content of a given text: this was a (rough) draft of an article I'm writing that looks at how lots of wares and religious objects were carted from across the Mediterranean, specifically from Venice to Ethiopia ... 1/2

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. I'm calm. I'm calm. I promise.

That, or the fact that those of us who took years to study the language & hone our writing skills (even if we occasionally double-check our prepositions) are now finding ourselves accused of using AI, see this excellent piece:
marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-...

Thank you! I rarely ever post anymore, and wasn't expecting this to make the rounds -- but it is all sorts of ghoulish. I wrote to Barry Flood yesterday and sent him the screenshot; unsurprisingly, he was quite aghast at this bizarre turn.

Wasn't expecting this to make the rounds it's done when I posted my cursed example yesterday, but it's comforting that I wasn't the only one shocked at just how badly Grammarly enshittified their product & added an extra layer of ick that just boggles the mind. bsky.app/profile/did:...

There's apparently no real English equivalent for the term, which is a shame! (dict.cc offered some, but I've never ever heard someone use any of them in real life).

Getting there is a lengthy process of hammering away at the sentences until the Stilblüten in evidence in the sample above are gone (& also involves getting severely insulted by my editor, incidentally my oldest childhood friend, a professional TV journalist, because "that's a footnote AT BEST!")

Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe Published in Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean (Vol. 34, No. 1, 2022)

This is it. Somewhere he has “This is a remarkable and fascinating book that opens up entirely new vistas on the cultural and political history of the fifteenth-century Mediterranean", which my publisher *immediately* pulled and put on the book's website lol.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Yeah, I hadn't realised all this went down -- being steamrollered by real life meant that I wasn't able to write a single word since last summer. Frantically tried to catch up on commitments last month, total confusion today when I went looking for the good old MS Word plugin.

Yeah it was the reference to David Abulafia, who passed so very recently, that really made me go uuuuhhhhhhhhh.

Their old product didn't do that, and certainly was useful enough to someone like me. I'm on the editorial board of a major journal in my field and we had exempted the old Grammarly specifically in out AI policy, because of its use to non-native speaker academics. Seems we need to revise the policy.

Yeah, that's what I've been thinking too -- they had a viable product that offered enough genuine benefit to someone like me that I had a subscription I didn't think to cancel for half a decade.

Not anymore.

a man stands in front of a sign that says ain 't nobody got time for that ALT: a man stands in front of a sign that says ain 't nobody got time for that

Yeah. And I mean, I've personally met three of the suggested experts and had meals with them in the past. Theoretically, I guess I could reach out for feedback -- but would I ever? No. No. Nooooo.

Turns out the "expert" review is just the system asking whether you've considered a somewhat random angle that it draws from someone's writing (which, however, indicates they used those books as training data -- and I'm sure Chris or Barry don't get compensated for that!)

I basically was unable to write a single word since last summer because I was so busy with care work after my dad's health emergency -- so I was completely baffled when first, the MS Word plugin was suddenly gone and apparently discontinued then, when I opened their website... this... happened.

I found it useful as a last-stop tool before submission, when my eyes were bleeding and I couldn't for the life of me spot any mistakes in my own writing anymore after reading it too many times ... but... wow.

Yeah. My billing history says I had a subscription for 7 years running.

Well, not anymore (tho apparently mine will run for a few more months as it just renewed, grrr).

I used to use it as a last-stop "tell me where I missed an 'a' or a 'the' in a given sentence" or to shout at me that 6 lines was maybe too long of a sentence and I should break it up.

This is not the same tool. Also the Word Plugin apparently stopped working completely. Cancelled subscription.

A really rather nonsense tangent suggested by Grammarly, based on Abulafia's book.

This is what I get when I do click it. Not particularly helpful or useful suggestion.

It's so strange. I mean, if I *had* to select expert reviewers for this particular article, I guess all of them would have been spot-on -- it's about medieval trade, it's about long-distance diplomacy between Europe and Africa and the extended Mediterranean, about objects ... but sweet baby Jesus.

taylor swift is covering her face with her hands and says absolutely terrifying . ALT: taylor swift is covering her face with her hands and says absolutely terrifying .

Rather apprehensive but also curious to see what happens when I click to summon Chris Wickham and Barry Flood, both of which I've met not too long ago, or — even more morbid — the late David Abulafia (who wrote the first ever review of my first book, and a really lovely one at that!).

Text on an academic article about "Moving Things: Moving Cartloads of Treasures from Venice to Ethiopia, ca. 1400" pasted into Grammarly in a Browser. It offers to invoke the digital ghosts of David Abulafia, Barry Flood and Chris Wickham to give me "expert feedback".

Using Grammarly for the first time in forever ... WHAT?

As a non-native speaker writing primarily in English, I used to use it to check prepositions, point out too long/convoluted sentences etc.

It now offers to summon colleagues both living and dead to "expert review" the piece???

What?

a woman wearing glasses says " am i self-sabotaging " ALT: a woman wearing glasses says " am i self-sabotaging "

I really need to stop deleting fully written manuscripts (did the same with "Kingship", and in retrospect, it was a very good move, but really not-fun while it lasted.) Still...

Yesterday, during the Q&A of a public Zoom lecture I was attending, someone in the audience asked whether my "Africa Collecting Europe" book—which I teased in the conclusion of my first book—was out.

Reader, there is not even a manuscript.
(There used to be one. In very me moment, I deleted it).

The image whose gold-paint making-of is described as "crush a white stone in a mortar, add it to cooking gold solution, and the result no longer looks like dry, dusty earth, but instead like gleaming gold". Image from Geshen Maryam, "Miracles of Mary" Manuscript, ca. 1400, made for Solomonic king Dawit, seen praying towards the Virgin (whose name and figure is ornamented in gold paint).

Medieval (Byzantine) art historian hive mind:

An Ethiopian Miracle of Mary describes the making of gold paint for an illuminated manuscript and says a Byzantine man appearing in a dream, crushing a "white, gleaming stone" into the gold paint to make it shine.

Any ideas what that substance is?