Confronting the CEO of the AI Company That Impersonated Me  🔗 **Source:** [Confronting the CEO of the AI Company That Impersonated Me](https://share.snipd.com/episode/7c7fb615-512e-447a-9a0f-1fee8f9595c0) ## Highlights - **How Expert Review Shipped And Got Killed** - Nilay Patel pressed Shishir Mehrotra on why Grammarly launched Expert Review using real journalists' names without permission and then removed it after backlash. - Mehrotra said a PM and a couple engineers shipped a low-usage feature meant to mimic admired experts, then killed it because it was bad for both users and experts. Transcript: Nilay Patel Right. 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, used my name among many other names, Casey Newton, Julie Angwin, down the line. Bellhooks was in there, which is hilarious in its way. You do not have our permission to use our names to do this. You had little check marks next to our name that indicated that 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. Shishir Mehrotra Yeah. So let's expect we to talk a bit about this. So lots of different thoughts on it. You know, first off, I'd say, you know, I understand and respect how challenging a world it is for experts and idea generators these days. You know, I've made a long career out of being a partner to folks like you, to folks like the ones you mentioned. It deeply pained me to feel that we under-delivered for them. And I'd really like to apologize for that. That was not our intention. On the specific feature you're talking about, I'm sure we'll talk more about it, but just to give the high-level view, my view of it is the feature was not a good feature. It wasn't good for experts. It wasn't good for users. It was a fairly buried feature. It had very little usage. You mentioned it last week and talked about it. It took months for anybody to even sort of find it. All that doesn't really matter. We can do much, much better. I believe we can and we will do better. We decided to kill it pretty quickly. Notably, we decided to kill it while there was some feedback, well before there was a lawsuit and so on. It was just not a good feature. It was misaligned to our strategy. It wasn't the way we wanted to go after it. And we have a much better view on how we think experts should participate in our platform, and I'm a lot more excited about that. Nilay Patel How many people work at Superhuman? About 1,500. So 1,500 people. How many people decided to launch this feature? Shishir Mehrotra It was a small team. It was probably a PM and a couple engineers. Nilay Patel Okay. Inside your decision-making process where you described a way of making sure you solicited the right feedback and then have groupthink, it never came up that using people's names Without permission would make them mad? Shishir Mehrotra You know, maybe we should step back and talk about what inspired this team and what they were trying to do and what fell short. So let's start with what they were trying to do. So, you know, they were heavily influenced by both, by what we view users to want and what we want experts to want. So start with users. You know, we think of Grammarly. A lot of people describe us as, they talk about us as the last mile of AI. They talk about us like, it feels like having your grammar teacher right next to you everywhere you work. And so many of our users will say things like, what would it feel like if instead of your grammar teacher, it was all the rest of the people in my life could be with me as well. I want my head of sales to sit next to me and tell me I'm about to recommend the wrong product. I want my support person to sit next to me and say, I'm about to email this person and you should know they had a big support issue last week, and you should acknowledge that before you talk To them. So that's the core ethos of what we're building, is taking Grammarly, expanding it so that many of these other experiences come along with you. For some of those people, the people they want feedback from are the people they admire. It's the experts in the world. It's the people that they're trying to look up to and trying to model. And they try to do that today with LLMs. They go to ChatGPT and Claude and they say, what would Neelay think about my writing? And so on. That was the inspiration for what the user was trying to do. I think on the other side was what the experts are trying to do. And I think as we formed our strategy here, turning Grambling to Platform, actually the first people I called when I think about this were a set of experts. I talked to some prominent YouTubers. I talked to a really prominent book author. And they all told me the same thing. It's a really hard world for experts out there right now. It's really hard to drive connection. If you're a book author, you know, your path to getting people, to getting to your fans is you keep publishing more and more books. And they all heard what we were doing and said, boy, it'd be really amazing to develop an ongoing connection with my fans. You know, what happens when they put my book down? Can I still be with them and help them along the way? And, you know, it feels like the world shifted against them. You know, AI overviews are stealing a bunch of their traffic and so on. And boy, this seems like a much better way to go after it. So that was the inspiration behind it. The team, you know, the feature didn't deliver. And I think it didn't deliver on either side of it, really. We ended up with an experience that was pretty suboptimal for the user and obviously suboptimal to the expert. I think the reason, actually the fundamental reason, is something you said last week, that it's really hard to distill what you would do as an editor based off the outcome of your published Work. I just think it's really hard for AI to do that, and we need your engagement for that to be a good feature. So I think they launched something that wasn't particularly good. You know, I think doing that and learning from it is part of the process, but that's what they thought they were doing. ([Time 0:08:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/63ab2030-106c-4ce2-bf17-8a1686b3b349)) - **Attribution Versus Impersonation Became The Core Fight** - Mehrotra drew a hard line between attribution and impersonation, arguing public work can be referenced with names and links but should not be used to impersonate someone. - Nilay Patel kept forcing the economic question by asking how much payment is owed when a company uses a person's name, likeness, or authority inside a product. Transcript: Nilay Patel Sure. How much do you think you should pay me to use my name? Shishir Mehrotra So I think it's really important to think about attribution and think about impersonation and so on. I think that the, you an expert, you have a trade you make on the internet. And I think the idea that when you put content out there, myself included, you hope people use it. You want to refer to other people's content. You want people to link to you. You really, really hope they attribute you when they do. So I think the idea of when somebody uses your content, should they attribute you? Of course. And to attribute you, you have to use your name. I think there's a different line, which is should people be able to impersonate you? And I think that is a very different standard. And we saw the lawsuit respectfully. We believe the claims are without merit. I think the idea that the feature was impersonation is quite a big stretch. The feature was very much a every mention was very clearly this is inspired not only by this person, inspired by a specific work from this specific person with a clear attributed link To get back to them. It was far from that test. If your work is used, should you be attributed? Yes, I think you should. I think that that would be the nice contract. It doesn't always happen. I think there's many products that will use your work and not attribute. We thought it was very important to attribute. But I think that would be the view. Let me flip around the other way. Nilay Patel Wait, let me ask you that question again. If you use my likeness, how much should you have to pay me? Shishir Mehrotra We should not be able to impersonate you, period. We did not. If we use your work, if any LLM product or any product at all uses your work, they should attribute you. And they should link back to you. And I think that's a human contract we have of how the internet is supposed to work. And And I think it's a really important one is that we should make sure. And I think it should be the standard you're looking for from LLMs too. I think it's a very different question you're asking here, which I think is a more important one. I'm not really here to defend this feature. I don't think it's a good feature. I don't really want to. I'm not trying to be close to this line. I think our main goal is to build a platform a lot like YouTube. You should choose to be on our platform. You should be able to choose and build an experience you trust. And you should choose your business model. And when you choose your business model, you should get paid for your contributions to it. That's the model we're working on. That's where I want to be. Nilay Patel I hear that you're saying you're not here to defend the future. I just want to put you in the chronology for one second. The feature was launched. It is true. It took a while before we even discovered it, wrote the story about it. It blew up. Many other people wrote stories about it. Your first response to the negative publicity was to offer people an email opt-out, where if you didn't want to be in the feature, if I didn't want my name to be used, I could email Superhuman And say, please take me out. Only after the lawsuit did you discontinue the feature. Why was the first step in email opt-out? Shishir Mehrotra We heard the first complaints from a handful of experts. They said, I'd like to opt out of the feature, and we addressed what they asked for. We then sat down and looked hard at the feature. And to be honest, I hadn't spent any time on it. I came and looked at it, and I said, this is all strategy for us. And we announced we were taking it down well before there was a lawsuit. The reason we took it down is it's all strategy. It's not what we want to do. That's not how we want to work with creators. We think we're building a platform you should want to be on. We think we're hopefully part of the solution for how you can take your work and make sure it's present for people everywhere. It wasn't our goal to be anywhere close to that line. But the future wasn't good. We took it out. ([Time 0:13:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5e1c3a5d-df5a-4364-98bf-7c6c6df9ed66)) - **Mehrotra Framed The Dispute Through YouTube** - Mehrotra compared this dispute to Viacom v. YouTube, saying legal compliance is only a floor and platforms should build creator-friendly systems beyond what the law requires. - He pointed to YouTube's Content ID and open revenue share as examples of going further after winning a lawsuit that still threatened the platform's existence. Transcript: Nilay Patel Yeah. When you think about that lawsuit, Julia's filed it. She's filed a class action lawsuit. There's a lot of ways that could go. You've said that claims are without merit. What did your lawyers say to convince you that the claims were without merit? Shishir Mehrotra What did the lawyers say? I think it's actually quite clear. I think the layman's test is pretty obvious. It's just not impersonation. When you look at the feature, there's a disclosure next to every single link at the top and the bottom of the panel, very clearly stating these are inspired by these people. It clearly states we have no relationship with these people. That's the feature. By the way, I'm not trying to defend it as a good feature. I don't want to be on this line. Maybe I could step back for a second and say, this is not the first time I've seen a situation like this. I used to run the team at Google. I used to run the YouTube team. When I got to YouTube, we had a big lawsuit from Viacom at the time. Lawsuit. And we won. We won on summary judgment, actually. We completely crossed the legal bar. But that's not the standard we held ourselves to. We looked at that and we said that the law doesn't require us to do this, but we chose to do a lot more. We launched Content ID as a way to make sure that creators could find content that other people uploaded on their behalf. We launched an open creator program, which as far as I know, is still the only platform with an open rev share that's out there. So I don't think the legal standard is the right standard to be looking at. I'm not trying to get close to it. It's fairly clear to me that we didn't cross below it, but that doesn't matter. We're not trying to be close to that standard. We think that creators, we need creators to work. We need their business models to work for our to work. And it's very similar to what happened at YouTube. We ([Time 0:19:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c421f695-334c-438b-b09f-f77ffab7d3a9)) - **AI Is Collapsing Old Internet Rights Categories** - Nilay Patel argued AI is collapsing the boundary between copyright, likeness, and attribution faster than platforms or lawmakers can respond. - He contrasted YouTube's mature monetization systems with AI products that can synthesize a person's style or identity before clear payment and permission rules exist. Transcript: Nilay Patel We're back with Superhuman CEO, Shashir Mahotra. I have a lot of thoughts about YouTube. I'm going to ask you about YouTube. I have a lot of thoughts about the Vidicom case. A lot of what happened with Google and YouTube is the foundation for the internet and the policy internet as we know it today. That is changing because of AI. So I do want to ask you about that stuff because I think your history will shed a lot of light on how people feel about particularly AI today. I just want to stay on this for one more turn. You're saying impersonation. That's not the claim in the lawsuit. The claim in the lawsuit is the law in New York and California that bars companies from using names and identities of people for commercial purposes without their consent. And so here you did have a commercial purpose. You were selling the software and names were appearing as inspired by our names. I'm not in this lawsuit. I haven't signed up for the class. The class hasn't been certified. I promise I haven't sued you yet. But the bar is very different than straightforward impersonation. It is the use of likeness for commercial purposes. And I'm just – you're saying without merit, and I haven't seen you address that specifically anywhere. Shishir Mehrotra You know, I think I'll have to leave the legal arguments for the lawsuit and for the court case. I think our view of it is that the set of work that was there was a fairly standard attribution that was well above the bar that any other product would do, what every LLM on the planet is Doing and so on, and didn't come close to using name and likeness in any way that was beyond attributing the source. Nilay Patel I mean, the thing I would say to you, and you've already said this feature is bad, so I won't hammer you on this too much, is I'm reading the edit that was generated with my name on it, which Is just bad. Yeah, I saw your screen, John. I would literally never give this edit. It says I should raise the stakes of a headline by adding emotional or stakes-based words that could underscore why this launch matters right now. I've been an editor for over 15 years. I've literally never said anything like that to a reporter. Shishir Mehrotra By the way, you pinned the reason why, right? I mean, the idea that you can uncover your editing style from the end work, I just think it's not possible. I mean, it's very hard to come back from that end work and say, what was the editing pass before that? To do that well, you have to do it. You have to sit down and say, here's how I would edit these things. And I think you can provide that service and you can get paid for it. And hopefully we're one of the platforms where you choose to do that. Nilay Patel And so you don't have an annotated list of whose names are used in the feature, but you have logs of everybody who used the feature, presuming those logs have the names in it. And you presume you'll be able to provide that if you get to this. I'm sure we'll be asked. Shishir Mehrotra Yeah. Nilay Patel Do you think you'll be able to provide that list? Shishir Mehrotra I'm sure we'll be asked. We'll see. Nilay Patel Because it strikes me that one way you could get around this lawsuit is by just saying, actually, we never used Julia's name until she went asking for it. In the same way that OpenAI, when they respond to the New York Times lawsuit, says, this never happened until you prompted us specifically to do the things you said are illegal. And here you have the same app. You could say, actually, we hadn't, until you asked us, we never generated your name. Has that come up? Shishir Mehrotra There's a lot of things in our defense that I won't cover. But I think the core of this argument isn't going to be that. The core of the argument is that what we did is normal attribution of content on the internet. Nilay Patel The reason I'm asking this question as harshly as I'm asking it is I don't think the defense is whether or not people use the product or whether or not the name has ever showed up. I think those are just sort of like clear cut, like binary on or off. Your name never showed up. You can't sue us. You're saying the defense is, hey, that's not how attribution should work. And you used to be the chief product officer at YouTube. And YouTube is defined by creator attribution scandals. Like every year, there's another scandal about React videos. Every year, there's another scandal about the usage of copyright, about whether or not you can make an AI creator out of Marques Brownlee and just run a million videos of him and steal His views. It's like the essence of the YouTube creator ecosystem. Do you know how YouTube reacted to this feature when we wrote the story? They invited me to an early preview of their AI likeness detection system because they knew that would be good press for them. If you were still running YouTube, would you have ever allowed a feature like this to go out? Shishir Mehrotra You know, it's interesting the way you just described it. First off, some of the ones you described, describing React videos as scandals is a very interesting way to describe it. Oh, they're absolutely scandals. Nilay Patel I understood your definition. Shishir Mehrotra They're also incredibly popular and have led to a whole genre of content being created. Likeness detection, content ID, they were all fantastic tools for creators. And they're great tools for creators. My team built the Content ID tool with the same idea. If Marquez Brownlee, if somebody does that to him and they copy his videos and put them up, then you can use that tool. And he can not only go claim them, he can go make money on them. And that is a tool we built for YouTube. And I think it's been incredibly popular. And we took what looked like a scandal and went well beyond it. To be super clear, it's not what the law requires. Nilay Patel No, I understand it's not what the law requires, but the use of Content ID and the issuing of copyright strikes, which is something I've experienced. If you issue a copyright strike as a creator against another creator, that is a nuclear move. That comes with severe social and community consequences. Shishir Mehrotra To be clear, if you use Content ID and you use it for monetization, you're not issuing strikes. Right. Nilay Patel But I'm saying the YouTube economy writ large is sort of defined, and in many ways the products are built around issues of attribution and payment and monetization and where the views Flow and where the money flows. And Content ID is a brilliant innovation because it allows people to get some views and the right people to get paid. YouTube doesn't exist without music. The music is everywhere on YouTube and the publishers get paid because Content ID can identify the music and get them paid. I understand that. But that is a system that tracks attribution and delivers monetization. And I'm just saying, I don't see how YouTube could have ever said, we're going to let Marques Brownlee edit your video without paying Marques Brownlee. It wouldn't exist in that ecosystem. And I'm just wondering if you see the distinction. Shishir Mehrotra You just said it. What YouTube did is said, when it happens, we're going to help you find it, but you're not preventing someone from doing it. It's a very different standard. Nilay Patel But you're making sure that people get paid. Shishir Mehrotra You're making sure after. To be clear, the idea of copyright is very different than a name and likeness claim. If I built a video that said, hey, I really like Marques Brownlee, and here's what I think he would say. Let me tell some jokes about Nile. It's a very different standard. The standard for YouTube was about copyright. And that's a set of regulations that are... ([Time 0:26:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/991fac21-b590-4ca8-871c-9a46e927e9db)) - **Why AI Feels More Extractive Than Earlier Platforms** - Nilay Patel argued AI's popularity problem comes from extraction, because people see models taking human work and threatening jobs without clear compensation. - Mehrotra disagreed that extraction explains the polling, saying most people mainly fear job loss and need better proof that AI will augment rather than replace them. Transcript: Nilay Patel Me ask you a different question. And I'm curious about this across the whole sweep, right, from YouTube to now. There's an NBC News poll that just came out about how people feel about AI. And the answer is bad. People feel badly about AI. AI is pulling. I think this is tough. AI is pulling behind ICE and only slightly above the Democratic Party. This is a tough spot to be in. It's a negative 20 perception. I think the reason for that is because it's so extractive and the value isn't there. And I would compare this to YouTube, which a lot of people thought was pretty extractive, right? You fought a pitched copyright battle about YouTube, about whether South Park could be on YouTube without permission and Viacom was going to sue you. And that case was fascinating because the public was decidedly on YouTube's side. Shishir Mehrotra Oh, that's an interesting memory of it. Nilay Patel I covered that case. I was in law school in school, like in studying copyright law during the case. And the vast majority of people were like, YouTube is really useful. We love it. And these big Hollywood companies suck. Napster, the public was not on the side of the record labels. They were not on the side of larger look. They were on the side of file sharing because the utility was so high regardless of the economic or social costs. I could keep going on and on with this. You can tell people all day long about the labor costs of Uber and they're still going to use Uber. You can tell people all day. There's a trial right now about whether social media platforms are damaging to teens' health, whether they're defect design products that hurt kids. The trial is ongoing as we speak. The jury is impaneled right now, and people are still going to use those platforms because they don't care. The environmental costs of big, stupid cars. You can tell people all day that trucks will ruin the environment. Americans buy trucks. That's what we're going to do. AI isn't, that isn't there. It is only perceived as extractive. It is not – it's less beloved than ice. That's crazy to me. Do you understand that the extractive nature of AI is causing a problem for the whole industry? Because you're sitting in the middle of one of these controversies right now. Shishir Mehrotra I think you're drawing a pretty broad link for why people are afraid of AI right now. Nilay Patel I think great consumer products that provide a lot of value overcome their social costs. Shishir Mehrotra I think there's the number one. I think AI has a lot of challenges ahead of it. There's lots of opportunity. It does meet your other tests. It has created some of the most popular products in history. And there are many people who would have you pry any of those products from their cold, dead hands. I think that the challenge with AI right now it's challenging people's sense of future of their humanity. It's their ability to work. Those are really the challenges there. I think the line we're talking about here, I don't think that's actually what you're reading into that poll. Nilay Patel What would you read into the poll where AI pulls below ice? You think people are just scared of their jobs? Shishir Mehrotra I think so. Do you understand that that's extraction? Nilay Patel You've taken the sum total of everyone's work on the internet, and now you're going to use it to replace human beings in their jobs without any economic recompense. Shishir Mehrotra That is certainly one way it could replace people's jobs. I don't think that's the way that most people are most worried about and how it could replace their jobs. But by the way, I think they're wrong about it. I don't actually think it's going to replace as many jobs it's going to create. I think actually one of the reasons why I think our model for thinking about AI is about bringing it to people and expanding their work. We like to call it the product that helps you become a superhuman. So I think they're wrong about it. But if you're asking me, why does it pull so low? It's because the copywriter feels like maybe I'm not going to need it anymore. It's the salesperson who says, I think, or a support person who says, I wonder if an agent's going to be able to do my job. I think the idea that that has something to do with name and likeness, I think, is a pretty big stretch. Nilay Patel Well, I mean, again, you're sitting in the middle of a controversy where a lot of people are mad at you for appropriating their work. If you're a copywriter at an ad agency, I know a lot of copywriters at ad agencies, they're saying, you took all of my work. Not you. The AI companies have ingested all of my work for training, and now they're going to replace me, and no one got paid. Hollywood is basically like, no one's paying us for this. People who write Tumblr are saying, now OpenAI is going to make a porny fanfic for people. That was our job. Why didn't you pay us? Shishir Mehrotra I think you're absolutely right. Creators are facing a very hard road right now. And I don't think it's caused just by this feature or just by the latest events. They're facing a hard future for a lot of different reasons. I think the poll you're referring to of the broad population, the broad population is not creators. The broad population has jobs that they are afraid may not be available to them. Whether they're a truck driver, whether they're a support person, that's what they're afraid of. I'm not diminishing the fact that creators also have an issue with AI. I'm just pointing out that the broad impression of AI, the challenge we have with it is that I think the entire industry has done a really bad job of helping people understand why technology Like this can help them and not prevent their job from being taken away. And most people just aren't creators. I'm not objecting to what you're saying about creators. Just saying most people aren't stressed about that because that's not their job. That's not what they're individually afraid of. Nilay Patel No, I understand what you're saying. I'm just pointing out that almost every major technological shift has been extracted in some way. Google copied all the books in the world with that permission. And then we had a Google Books case and Google had to win that case. And they did. They were able to do it. And Google had to win the Viacom case with YouTube. Google had to win the Google Images case against Perfect 10, which was maybe the least sympathetic plaintiff of all time because it was a porn company and Google was doing Google image Thumbnails of softcore porn. And it was obvious that Google was going to win that case. But they still had to win that case. All of this stuff got litigated at pretty intense levels in ways that are precedent still to this day. And it doesn't feel like we're spending the time to litigate, hey, you can just make a deep fake of my face and use it to sell headphones on Alibaba. Hey, you can just start a company and say, well, it's attribution. So I'm just going to use the names of famous people on my product to say these are the edits. Like there's a link there that seems very direct to me, maybe just as a creator, but also I would submit to everyone else who says there's a pretty extractive cost here and the consumer Benefits are not nearly as apparent. Shishir Mehrotra I'll tell you, I think in some ways I like the YouTube analogy. I think it's a good way when I talk to our team about why the legal standard shouldn't be the minimal standard we try to hit. I will also tell you that what we're doing here at Superhuman, I don't expect to be very close to this line. I think there are other products that are very close to this line. I think our core strategy is about building a platform that you ca... ([Time 0:40:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/48190af3-c9c7-421c-a5f9-0567609082ef)) - **A Subscriber Verified Model For Licensed AI** - Mehrotra predicted copyright fights over model training may end with segmented access, where AI systems use premium sources only for verified subscribers. - He gave a concrete example: prove you subscribe to The New York Times, then ChatGPT or Gemini could answer from Times content under that license. Transcript: Nilay Patel We're back with Superhuman CEO Shashir Mahotra. If the incremental cost of a token skyrockets because suddenly the AI companies have to pay massive licensing fees to copyright owners downstream, what happens to your business? Shishir Mehrotra I don't think it really matters to us because it'll all happen in the models underneath us. But I don't mean to say it doesn't matter to us as our own entity. It matters to me as a citizen. I mean, I think it's really important. But I would also remember, like, for us, the primary agents people are trying to build on Superhuman have nothing to do with this. I mean, the expert case is one case. I mean, what people are doing with our product is they're going and taking their sales methodology and turning it into agents for their salespeople to be able to use. They're taking their support tools, they're taking their calendars and making sure that as you're writing an email and saying, I can meet tomorrow at 6 p.m., please make sure that I'm Actually free then. Like I said, this is not a common part of our business. Nilay Patel We're not— No, I'm not saying the expert review part. I'm saying what you're describing, take all of my sales literature, take my calendar. That gets loaded into context for a model that you call. Shishir Mehrotra Yeah. Nilay Patel If the incremental cost of a token in that model goes up because the AI companies suddenly have to pay a bunch of copyright licensing fees, what happens to your business? Shishir Mehrotra I mean, if I were those companies, the solution I would have isn't to go distribute that cost across all users. I would charge users a subscription for using that information. I think that's the business model they should have. My personal view is what should happen is I should come to ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, and I should prove that I'm a New York Times subscriber, and then it should give me answers from the New York Times. And the New York Times is going to have to make a choice of do I only want my content to be used for my subscribers or not. But if I were those companies, that's what I would promise. I'd say I just won't use it. Nilay Patel But a lot of these, all these cases are different. So I'm going to generalize here, and you can attack me for generalizing. That's fine. But broadly, they split into two lines. There's one, the thing you're describing, which is you spit out content that I've already made, right? Like Suno can make a Beyonce song. That's copyright infringement on output. The other set of cases where I think it's much more important is on input, is on training, right? And saying you actually ingested all my material without permission. That's also copyright infringement. And if that goes the wrong way for the model companies, their cost structures change in retrospect. You can't build the systems you're describing because the model itself is infringing. Shishir Mehrotra That's what I was responding to. So an output, a copyright law covers it. And I think if you actually produce something that could be mistaken for the work of another person, then you can file a claim. You can get it taken down. And then you can get, if they choose to leave it up, you can choose to negotiate a revenue share agreement or whatever you might want to do with that. That output is cleared. Input is not cleared, like you said. And the cases haven't been resolved in a particularly clear way. The point I was making is if I were them, I wouldn't take the cost of input and distribute it across all users. I would split the model. If it really went that way. And I would say, fine, you don't want your content there. I will build a version of the model that is just for time subscribers and charge them. Your particular question was, will that cost get passed along to the other users of the alums? I mean, that is what's happening right now. I mean, they are paying that content. It is being passed to us. Does it matter to us? I mean, frankly speaking, the pace of innovation in that category is so high that the profits being generated there are so high that, no, it hasn't mattered to the upstream users, to Us, to ChatGPT users, Gemini users, so on. It hasn't stopped their growth at all. Will it someday? Maybe. I don't know. But my point was more in this world of like output copyright is fairly clear. Law covers it pretty well. Input copyright is not that clear. And it's not clear for good reason, right? If you're a human and you read a book and then you learn something and you talk about that thing, like, you know, what should happen? That's a legitimate question that hasn't been well-tested in the courts. I don't think the industry is going to take that cost and just pass it along to all users. But we'll see. If it does, then it does. We'll have to deal with it. Everybody will. Nilay Patel By the way, most humans cannot infinitely scale to create trillions of dollars of enterprise value by reading one book. That's the difference, right? To get that value at that scale, usually lots of people have to buy copies of the book. And the economics spread out, right? I mean, the scale is the difference. Shishir Mehrotra I think I understand that is a very fair argument that this is not the same as a human reading the book. And obviously, that's the line being taken there. I would postulate that whatever way that case ends up, the correct answer for experts is it's time for a new business model. And I think the idea that that's going to get into the exactly right spot and you're going to get pennies for every query coming through Gemini. That's certainly one path. I think when I went and talked to people about what we're doing here at Superhuman, what they told me is, actually, I don't really want to be fishing for pennies whenever my work gets used. I want to build connection with people. I didn't build content to put it out there and get paid a of every use. I want to go build a product that actually connects with people. ([Time 0:54:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/55a89853-03a3-4aa4-997e-34023779ad88)) - **The New Creator Pitch Is Build An Agent** - Mehrotra's answer to creator displacement was a new business model: turn expertise into paid agents that users keep beside them while they work. - Nilay Patel pushed back that this asks creators to rebuild value from scratch after AI companies already absorbed their past work without compensation. Transcript: Nilay Patel Well. Let me ask you about that specifically. I wasn't Southwest Southwest. We have a little baby. I didn't travel this year. But I watched Instagram. I experienced South by Southwest through the magic of Instagram and TikTok. You had a suite there at South by Southwest. I looked at some of the videos. The caption on one of the carousels, I'm just going to read you the caption. This is from the superhuman suite at South by Southwest. A lot of talks there. The summary of the talks was, AI can't replace human creativity, empathy, or emotion. It won't take all of our jobs, but it will reshape how we work. And in the AI era, taste and judgment are more valuable than ever. Valuable on what metric? Is it dollars? It's valuable in every metric. I mean, I think it's- Specifically dollars. Dollars are what I pay my mortgage in. Is it dollars? Shishir Mehrotra Sorry, I didn't understand the question. Nilay Patel If my taste and judgment are more valuable than ever, but it's also infinitely replicable and you think I need a new business model, or every creator needs a new business model, or every Shishir Mehrotra Expert needs You made a big leap from that. How do I make more dollars? Nilay Patel If my taste and judgment are more valuable than ever, where do the extra dollars come from? Shishir Mehrotra So just to be clear on the tagline for superhuman, what we believe is that we can help all our users become superhuman by bringing them tools that allow them to expand their work. The main way we think about people is that Grammarly doesn't do your work for you. Grammarly helps make you a better writer. And you still publish your essay. You still post your article. It's our job to turn you into a superhuman. That our promise to our users. So, guys, that's what the banner's about. I think your question, I think, is a very good question. What would— Wait, that's not what the banner says. Nilay Patel Taste and judgment are more valuable than ever. And I'm just asking you to define the value and what value is going up and what value is going down. Shishir Mehrotra If you're using Grammarly and you're a student, you're a person who's a salesperson, it is your taste and judgment that is actually what gets valued in the end. We're here to help make sure you don't make a mistake. We're here to help make sure that you present yourself the best possible way. That's what that banner is about. Addressing, we have 40 million users who use our products. The vast majority of them work in professional industries. They're salespeople, they're support people. That's who that's addressing. And we're trying to tell them, don't worry about losing your job when you use our products because we're here to help you scale more. We're here to help you be a better version of you. That's what that banner is about. That's what our promise is about. I do think we have a proposition for you, Nile, as well, which is that you can now become one of those assistants to all those people. And many of them have no idea that they could use your help. But if you can build that relationship with them like Grammarly does, and people personify Grammarly all the time as my high school English teacher sitting next to me everywhere I work, That makes me better. If I can have my high school English teacher with me everywhere I work, it makes me better. It makes my trust and judgment shine through. I would like your agent, for the people that matter, for people for whom you matter, you should be able to build an agent that sits right next to them and you can actually feel like their Editor. Now, you've got to do some work to make that a good experience. You're going to have to figure out how to document your editing style in a way that actually produces a good result, not like the one you quoted earlier. But if you can do that, you should be able to build that relationship. You should be able to construct it the way you want. You should control it, and you should be able to make money on it. And you should... Yeah. Nilay Patel Wait, hold on. I'm just going to... You understand that you're saying I have to do that because all of the work I've produced in my career to date has been taken without compensation by AI companies. You're saying I need to invent some new business model as an expert and upload an agent of myself to your tool and then advertise it to get a 70-30 revenue split from however many people Use Grammarly because my actual body of work has been reduced to zero value. That's a pretty hard sell. Shishir Mehrotra I mean, I'm not here to tell you how to answer every question for what's changed in the creator economy. I think it's one way to look at it is that the path of being a creator has become harder. I think there's other ways that, you know, I assume this is going to end up on YouTube and Spotify and so on. There's paths to becoming a creator that become easier. And I think there were folks that when YouTube came out, they told us all the same things. And they said, we don't understand. Our business model is screwed over there. And so why should we work on YouTube? And the ones that looked at it that way and saw it as replacement ended up not moving forward to the future. Obviously, you did. You run a show on all these platforms, and you figured out a way to turn that into a business. And I think you saw that opportunity and you expanded what you could do. I think there's about to be, I think if we look at AI from that perspective and say, AI is here and it's reducing the number of people who need to traffic to my current experiences, I think That's one way to look at it. And I think there will be some creators that look at it that way. I would hope we look at it the other way and say some of these platforms are going to give you a way to participate, are going to give you a way to take your expertise and put it in front of people In a way that actually helps them in a different way than you could connect in the past. And I think that's a bright future. I'm not really trying to say you have to or you don't have to. I think it's an expansion opportunity. I'm not really here to defend what some other company is doing with content. What's happening there is happening there. I'm just saying creators feel that pressure. We recognize it. I think there's an opportunity. I had one creator tell me that their traffic in just the last year from Google is down 50%. They said that AI overviews and so on, traffic is down 50%. They sell books. And my reaction to them was, that really sucks. I mean, I understand why that really sucks. I would also tell you, if you're a book author, waiting for people to search your name on Google has got to be the least good way to monetize your expertise. So now let's talk about how we can take what you do well and get it in front of people in a way that creates value in a different way. And maybe we can do it in a way that isn't tons of incremental work for you and brings you a new type of opportunity. And I think platforms like ours are going to give that opportunity to people who choose to take it. ([Time 1:00:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8171d5a5-ca32-455c-80e2-bce5c5df2e11)) - **Why Mehrotra Thinks SaaS Survives The AI Layer** - Nilay Patel extended the extraction argument to software itself, asking why anyone would pay SaaS margins if frontier model companies can replicate features directly. - Mehrotra said software survives through coordination and network effects, using CRM as his example: one salesperson needs memory, 100 salespeople need shared systems. Transcript: Nilay Patel Can I extend this to you as the CEO of a software company? Sure. This is the same argument I hear about the frontier models, the AI companies, their sort of relentless expansion into every category, and then what you might call the cesspocalypse. Why would I pay your margin on tokens that you're buying from them when I can just buy their tokens directly and just talk to Claude? Why wouldn't I just vibe code something that looks like Grammarly and run it instead of paying? You're like $160 a year? This is the thing that's coming for the software industry writ large. Do you feel that same pressure? Shishir Mehrotra I personally think it's a little overstated. I give you my view of it. So I think that there's a lot of software. The ability to build software is definitely getting much, much easier. I think the reasons why people choose to use software is often because it does a job particularly well and that there's often a network effect associated with it. I'll give you an example, and I'll just focus on CRM. So people look at the SaaSpocalypse, they go and try to judge Salesforce and say, why would anybody pay for Salesforce? I could just Vibe code my own version of it. Well, first they say, why would anybody have a CRM? And then if they do need a CRM, why would they pay for Salesforce? So maybe I'll answer both questions. So why pay for a CRM? And, you know, my view of it is that, you know, when you have groups of humans working together, you need software for them to work together. So if I have one salesperson, you know, I can keep all my sales in my head. If I have 10 salespeople, you know, maybe I can do it with a spreadsheet. When I have 100, I need software to keep them together. That software today is called CRM software. I think when I have 1,000 agents selling on my behalf, I'm going to need a way for them to coordinate with each other. It might be different, but I do think it's going to be important. Why is it going to be products like Salesforce? I don't know if it will be Salesforce, but the reason is it becomes, I think all the powers of network effects are going to become much higher. And you're going to say, these are products for which I'm going to pick the product that is plugged into the ecosystem in different ways. Why would people rebuild Grammarly? I mean, I'm sure they'll try. I mean, my hope is by that point, we are the platform for all the best agents that work right where you work. And you'd have to go replicate all of them. And I'm sure there will be people that will, but I think most people won't. And I think that's an important bet for how the software industry moves on. ([Time 1:06:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/96bbd991-1e06-414e-9b92-b4fd8ebf00cd)) - **The Internet Is Tilting From Media To Merch** - Nilay Patel described the internet as drifting toward QVC, where creators increasingly monetize through products because making media itself pays less and less. - Mehrotra reframed the landscape as ads versus subscriptions versus purchases, arguing the strongest path is direct connection deep enough that a thousand fans will pay meaningful recurring revenue. Transcript: Nilay Patel Just want to end on a big thing. Again, you used to run these platforms. You're on the board at Spotify. I know you think about the economy here and how work gets produced and who gets paid as deeply as anyone. I look at the shape of the media landscape right now, the information landscape that you might call the internet, and I say, boy, everything is slowly turning into QVC. Like making this stuff is getting devalued every single day. Being the person who makes the stuff is getting harder and harder. It's something you've repeated several times now over the past hour. And at the end of it all, the creators all have to pivot to selling something. The Paul brothers have to sell you bottled water. Mr. Beast has to sell you energy bars. Like we've devalued the work so much that unlike any other industry in the world, the internet industries, the information ecosystem pivots from bits to atoms. That's pretty rare in the history of business. Most businesses pivot from atoms to bits. The margins of bits are historically much better than the margins of atoms except on YouTube. Except every major artist has to be on tour forever because the money from selling music itself is so low. AI is bringing that at scale. You can feel the pressure. This whole conversation has been about that pressure. And maybe the legal doctrines don't line up exactly. And maybe I'm making too many generalizations. And I hear the criticisms that you've parried me with. But that's what I feel is that all of these platforms at the end are becoming about someone trying to sell you something else. I think – And AI is just accelerating that. I'm just wondering where you think the endpoint is. Shishir Mehrotra Actually, I think it's an interesting characterization. I mean, I think there are multiple business models out there. What you described as bits to Adams, I think is one way to look at it. I mean, I think the reason why YouTube creators end up with those other opportunities is not because, I mean, I'm sure some of them feel like the ad revenue from YouTube is not enough. It's because there's an opportunity, right? Why would you not take an opportunity? I think have to is one way to describe it. Get to is a different way to describe it. The other thing I'd say is I don't really think it's quite accurate to say bits versus atoms. I think it's much more advertising versus subscriptions versus purchases. And I don't think the spread on that is really about the bit or atom piece. It's about the connection piece. There's a set of platforms that are built off eyeballs. I mean, what I built at YouTube was primarily built off eyeballs. And there is, you know, over all of history, the amount of advertising spend has always been some percentage GDP. It's hovered between 2% and 4% of GDP forever. And that gets divided up amongst all these eyeballs, and that is one business model. And yes, the number of creators fighting for that has dramatically fragmented over the last couple decades in every platform. And so what can come from that is smaller. There's also the ability to sell products. And as old as time has been the ability to sell products. And in the middle is the ability to build connection. And I think those products tend to do a lot of work with subscriptions. I mean, it's interesting when we think about some of my favorite creators, many of them subscribe to the thousand fans theory that if you can get a thousand people to pay you a hundred Bucks a year, you all of a sudden have a hundred thousand dollar business. And I think that there's a whole class of people for whom they've decided if I can, I can either go somewhere where I get a little bit of money every time somebody happens to blink and look At me, or I can get them all the way down the funnel to buy my hamburger or my water bottle. Or in the middle is I can build a deep enough connection with a person that they're willing to pay me a substantial amount of money on an ongoing basis, and I don't need a lot of them. And if I can do that, then I can build a real business out of it. And there's some fantastic creators who have done a really good job of that. Many of the ones I'm sure you know. I think what I'd like to do, what we're trying to do with Superhuman and our agent platform, is enable people to build that level of connection. I mean, a lot of them are doing newsletters. I mean, it's very meaningful to say, I got a newsletter. It's $100 a year. Here's how you can do it. A thousand people get through to $100,000. 10,000 people get through to a a million bucks a year. It feels like a meaningful connection. In our case, I'm saying AI is going to allow us to do more than show up in your inbox. It's going to allow you to show up with a red pen and a blue pen right next to the person and say, I can help you in the thing you're doing, at least the part of it that we're working on. And I'm willing to gamble that can you go get a thousand people to say that's worth a hundred bucks a year to me? I think you'll be able to. And I ([Time 1:09:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bf3dcf00-cf50-45f5-bcde-d1608127fc6e)) - **AI Agents Will Work First In Narrow Teachable Domains** - Mehrotra admitted creative agents will not work first by perfectly replicating unique voices; early wins will come from narrower domains closer to teachable methods. - He said grammar, teaching, sales, and slide-building fit today's models better than capturing Nilay Patel's editorial taste, which even skilled human collaborators struggle to mirror. Transcript: Nilay Patel Think, wait, I'm just going to ask you this as directly as I can. Do you think that feature will be good? Shishir Mehrotra I think it'll be as good as the work that the creator puts into it. And it's a little bit like, you know, are all newsletters good? No, most newsletters suck. There's no, there's no guarantee that the newsletter platform can make them good. You know, is every YouTube video good? No. They're mostly, they're quite terrible. But does it allow? Nilay Patel But do you think you can get an, like, I don't know what your tool looks like to build an agent inside your platform. But I haven't seen an LLM that can replicate my writing, let alone my editing. You know, you're dependent on the capabilities of the models themselves. So I'm asking you kind of in a general way, but you know how your tool is built. Can you actually make a tool that can do that well? I think so. Shishir Mehrotra I would say that I think we did a pretty good job with Grammarly. We replicated a grammar teacher pretty well. Can we do that with a broader spectrum of things? I believe so. I think we have some good evidence of it already with some of the agents working on our platform. Can we build a good one for you, or can you build a good one for you? I don't know. I'd love to work with you on it. Nilay Patel What does that tool look like? How does build a good tool that lets me edit look like? Shishir Mehrotra You know, I think the start of it is actually, it's what you said earlier, like you have to write down that viewpoint. Like what is your editing like? Nilay Patel And so that's- No, but I mean literally describe the interface that your tool provides me to do that. Shishir Mehrotra Oh, the main part of the interface is prompt box and what we call triggers. And so you're going to say, here's my instruction. Think of it like you're going to publish your manual. And here's your trigger. So here's a set of things that say, when you see this, do this. And here's my manual. Here's how I think about things. And when you see this, do this. When you see it, like you gave the example of feedback on a headline. You didn't like the feedback you gave on the headline. It's reasonable. I wonder if you could write down what feedback would you give on a headline? Let me suggest a different way to think about it. Pretend for a moment you were trying to train someone else. You're saying, hey, I'm going to hire an employee and I'm going to scale myself and I'm going to teach them to be like me. How would you teach them? So you'd probably sit down with them and you'd write some things down. And then the second thing you'd do is you'd watch them do it, and then you'd correct them. And so the other piece we have to do is we have to say, you need to get feedback. And you need to be able to come through and say, that was a shitty suggestion. Don't do that again. And so that's what that interface has to feel like. You give a set of instructions, you give a set of triggers, and then you get feedback. And you say, this worked, this didn't work. We call them accept to look greats. You're going to come back, you're going to look at it and say, yeah, that clearly didn't work. It didn't work. Maybe it might be it didn't work for the user. They ignored my suggestions. Maybe it didn't work for what you think was good work. You looked at the output and said that wasn't particularly good work. And you're going to train it. And I think the idea of being able to train a custom agent for each person, for each product, I think is really interesting and compelling. I don't think it's going to be easy to do for everybody, but the people who do it well will be like the prominent YouTube creators of today. You're going to make a very deep connection with a broad set of people in a way that you're never going to capture with ad dollars or with selling water bottles. Nilay Patel Do you have an example of one of these that you think works well today? Shishir Mehrotra I mean, I think Grammarly is the most obvious one. Most of the other really good ones. Nilay Patel Grammarly is like grammar, right? It's rules-based in a very specific way. Grammar has rules. It has a logic. It's squishy on the margin, but there's good grammar and there's bad grammar, and you can pretty clearly detect the two. Shishir Mehrotra It's actually interesting. Grammarly is a stack of models. The base level model is actually spelling. Spelling is the very core definitional thing. Grammar has pretty good rules. Spelling is really clear rules. Grammar has pretty good rules. But actually, the reason why people use Grammarly is we go well beyond that. We do advice on tone. We do advice on style. We do, hey, this is making you sound harsh. These are all things when people pay for Grammarly. That's the type of suggestions they get from us. And they seem to like them. There's 40 million people who use it every day. There's a wide set of partners that have jumped onto the platform and built agents as well. Many of them are closer to tools. One launched a couple weeks ago from Gamma that helps you build a really good slide deck. They did a lot of work to take, what did you write, how do I turn it into a slide deck? We've seen a lot of them being built inside of companies. I think the sales example I gave is a very common one. If I'm a head of sales, I have a sales methodology. You should always ask these three questions. You should always pitch our product in these ways. They write those down. They turn it into an agent and say, make sure this is in front of people while they're working. I think some of them are great. Nilay Patel Those are enterprise uses. I actually understand the sales use case a lot. You need the salespeople all to say the same thing all the time. I understand they don't do that all the time. We have salespeople. Can a creative one work? I'm asking – I don't think taste is rules-based. But actually, I'm confident that a coder of producers are in the background here – just in a puddle because part of their job every week is to try to write like me. And they get a lot of feedback from me directly on I would – this is – I'm literally editing the document so I can read the intros and outros and I'm changing the questions. And it's really hard even when it's just three people who have spent years working together to try to get to an output that works. And they're really good. Shishir Mehrotra Yeah. I think it's totally fair that it's not. And my guess is the types of experts that will first prevail here won't be the ones you're describing. That make something creative, sound unique, make it sound better, is probably not the ones that'll work first. But I do think there's a set of experts and creators that will work great. I mean, maybe I'll pick the ones that are right next to Grammarly. I think there's a set of teachers for whom this is going to work really good. They're going to say, hey, in addition to making sure your grammar is good, it looks like you're writing something about history. I can probably help you cover history more clearly. It's not quite as clear as grammar facts, but it's pretty close. Like, this is what happened in this period. You should know these different elements of it. I think teachers will be a great example of that. I think that as you work up to the more and more creative side of it, we all know that what our alum is really good at, they're really good at averaging what everybody says. So can they do something really unique like you do? No, probably not. Can they take some part of your suggestion and turn it into enough usefulness that you can get 1,000 people to pay 100 bucks a month? I bet you can come up with something. Because the bar... ([Time 1:14:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/00fde408-8611-41c0-ae3a-bc8042f1b697))