Is using Grammarly AI assistance?
Increasingly yes — and the honest complication is that the answer changed without most users noticing, because the product added generative features to a tool they had used for years as a spellchecker.
Last reviewed 15 August 2026 · The HumanFlow team
Grammarly today ships a free AI humanizer and a free standalone AI detector, plus a Humanizer agent offering four voices and a custom voice profile built from a 200-word sample of your writing. Those are generative features by any reading, and they sit in the same application as the underlining that catches a missing comma.
That is what makes the question hard to answer in the abstract. "I used Grammarly" now covers everything from accepting a spelling correction to having a passage rewritten in a voice modelled on your own prior work, and a policy written about the first may or may not have contemplated the second.
Grammarly's own position on the humanizer is unusually direct for this market. Its documentation states the tool "is not intended to bypass AI detectors", and warns that using a humanizer to disguise AI use "may be considered unethical and could constitute cheating or plagiarism". That is a vendor telling you the feature has a boundary, which is worth more than most claims in this category.
So the practical answer is to describe what you did rather than which app you opened. "I used a grammar checker" and "I had a paragraph rewritten" are different disclosures, and only the second is likely to matter.
When this answer changes
It changes with your institution's wording. Policies naming "AI writing assistance" plainly cover the generative features; policies naming "grammar and spelling tools" as permitted may not, and some name Grammarly specifically in one direction or the other.
It also changes when the product does. A feature added to an app you already had installed can move you from clearly permitted to clearly covered with no announcement, which is the mechanism that caught people out here.
Where to go next
- What counts as AI assistance? — The general version of this question, and where the answer actually lives.
- HumanFlow vs Grammarly — What Grammarly actually ships, with the figures and the correction we published when we got them wrong.
- Grammarly Authorship — The feature that records where each part of a document came from as you write — the strongest answer to this question that does not depend on anyone believing you.
- Academic integrity — Why the same action is compliant at one institution and a breach at another.
- The punctuation rumour — Why no detector counts em dashes, and why deleting yours only makes the writing worse.
Sources
One of our direct answers.