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DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

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41–50 of 218 posts

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DoNotPay predates GPT by quite a bit -- it used to be pretty positively received on HN e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822289

Yes! I used this "AI" tool to help a friend write a letter to her landlord. It was not at all "generative AI" and seemed to just paste modules together based on her answers to its questionnaire. To your second point, it's very funny how OpenAI seems to have soured the tech crowd on tech.

It's love and hate relationship with AI.

All engineers I know in tech are bashing AI left and right and going home to work on AI projects in their free time.

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes I think about where I would be in life if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this. I think about this all the time. If I didn’t have a conscience, I would be retired by now.

You might be retiring in jail, though.

Unfortunately, "if it's an app, it's legal".

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#43
The problem with today's technology is it is indistinguishable from magic. Sometimes the magic is real, sometimes it's an illusion. It's nearly impossible as a regular consumer not deeply knowledgable of the current capabilities of models to know which is which.

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#44
post #4

> DoNotPay also did not "hire or retain any attorneys" to help verify AI outputs or validate DoNotPay's legal claims. Wow, that's brave. Create a wrapper around ChatGPT, call it a lawyer, and never check the output. $193k fine seems like peanuts. Sometimes I think about where I would be in life if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this.

> if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this.

You mean you'd be like any other corporation or property manager or attorney? If you operate in the confines of the law that's all that matters. If you give normal people the same power to litigate as a billionaire, that's a feature, not a bug.

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#45

FTC overreached here: the AI was not tested to see if it is like a lawyer’s level of work. Why would anyone have to do this kind of study? Back in the day, anyone who touted AI generated works by default exclaimed that the work was not as good as a human. That changed now but was a valid statement back then.

> Why would anyone have to do this kind of study?

Because the company chose to publish ads with misleading claims about the efficacy of their system.

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#46
Ok well it seems my test for whether we really have AI yet (are there self-driving lawyers) remains unsatisfied. For me lawyers work is significantly easier to automate with some proto-AI than is software development or driving a car. So although recent AI progress is highly impressive, I'm not retiring until it takes over the lawyers.

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#47
post #34

It's amazing to me that people think they need other people to resolve disputes, or that "law" is some kind of magic... And yet people keep thinking so, both selling it as magic, and buying it as magic, and not once taking the time to consider what the words on the paper might mean.

It's the same with plumbing, wiring, programing, writing, cooking, gardening, and most of the other verbs. For the most part, everyone can do these things, but it's nice to pay someome else to do it; especially in fields where experience gives expertise and hopefully wisdom. Also, it's handy to hire a licensed practicioner in fields where government requires licensure to sell services. Some people are really woried a…

It's a matter of opportunity costs as well. If you want to be able to do plumbing, wiring, framing... you likely don't also have the time to learn the potentially vast amount of knowledge required to adeptly navigate the legal system.

> Some people are really woried about making big mistakes that are expensive to clean when plumbing or wiring or lawyering.

Even worse, if you lawyer wrong (or wire wrong), you might not be able to clean it up - you just do your time or perhaps die.

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#48

FTC overreached here: the AI was not tested to see if it is like a lawyer’s level of work. Why would anyone have to do this kind of study? Back in the day, anyone who touted AI generated works by default exclaimed that the work was not as good as a human. That changed now but was a valid statement back then.

I have not seen any evidence that AI output can reach quality levels of a human.

Any non-trivial code generated by it takes more time to debug than just writing it from scratch.

Its "art" is abominably bad and repetitive.

Text generated by AI reads like corporate ad copy written by several committees of committees.

"Lovecraftian nightmare" best describes its video output.

AI voice generation sounds like soulless ripoffs of famous voice actors (the Attenborough clone is the worst) with misplaced stresses and an off-putting cadence derived from being completely unable to understand the broader context of the work it is narrating.

Its explanations on things are inferior to the first paragraph of any wikipedia article on the query topic.

A child with a pirated copy of FL-Studio can make more interesting music.

The wall being erected by AI customer service agents between a problem and an actual human who might be able to solve it is frustrating and useless.

On top of all of that the answers it confidently gives (almost always with no sources) are often extremely wrong.

Is there a secret AI product everyone is using that is actually good?

Edit: AI is however extremely good at rapidly creating an endless stream of barely-passable content designed to distract very cheaply so I expect its use by marketing and social media firms to continue its meteoric rise.

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I used this "AI" tool to help a friend write a letter to her landlord. It was not at all "generative AI" and seemed to just paste modules together based on her answers to its questionnaire. To your second point, it's very funny how OpenAI seems to have soured the tech crowd on tech.

It's love and hate relationship with AI. All engineers I know in tech are bashing AI left and right and going home to work on AI projects in their free time.

You can simultanously believe that AI:

* Is massively overhyped by certain persons and companies, and

* Is both interesting and has loads of promise, so is worth working on in your own time

They aren't contradictory at all.

Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says

#50

FTC overreached here: the AI was not tested to see if it is like a lawyer’s level of work. Why would anyone have to do this kind of study? Back in the day, anyone who touted AI generated works by default exclaimed that the work was not as good as a human. That changed now but was a valid statement back then.

Yeah why would any company have to test the efficacy of their product before making claims about its efficacy?

Snark aside, this is literally a quote from their marketing: "what this robot lawyer can do is astonishingly similar—if not more—to what human lawyers do."

So to claim that they “exclaimed that the work was not as good as a human” is inaccurate.

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