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

arstechnica.com

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

#51

Post by gosub100 »

nerdjon wrote: post #5

I am honestly surprised the fine is not more. We need to see more of these come out as AI is shoved dangerously into places thanks to the ability to use it with little to no technical knowledge. Especially when you are really just shoving data into an LLM and expecting a response to do some job, you are not training it to do a specific task. Like the home buying AI that was on HN yesterday.

If a tenant is able to file a case that costs his corporate, PE owned landlord $25k to litigate, that's a win in my book. That's the same landlord who increased the rent 20% per year for the last 5 years because "the Market", well, Blackstone, welcome to the "market" where each eviction now costs you a collateral amount for ruining a hard working persons life. Imagine that, if there were a consequence to greed?

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

#52

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

ziddoap wrote: post #32
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It worked as well as any other eighteen dollar a month lawyer back when I tried it in 2017/2018. It was actually free back then I used it the one time and felt grateful enough for the help that I signed up for one cycle and then cancelled (since I didn't have a continued need for it). Nothing gross or deceptive.

> Nothing gross or deceptive. They just had to pay a fine for deceptive advertising. The article lists a number of other deceptive and immoral business practices.

I actually used the service in question during that time frame and did not feel deceived by their advertising. In fact, I felt good enough about the experience that I threw them a few bucks after the fact to compensate them for some of the value that they gave me.

You read an article about it and 7 years later and are convinced they are crooks.

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

#53

Post by dangsux »

ryandrake wrote: post #16
ziddoap wrote: 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.

> 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.

[dead]

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

swatcoder wrote: post #38
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #12

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.

> To your second point, it's very funny how OpenAI seems to have soured the tech crowd on tech. They represent an amplifier for the enshittening that was already souring the tech crown on tech. LLM's used in this sort of way, which is exactly OpenAI's trillion dollar bet, will just make products appear to have larger capabilities while simultaneously making many capabilities far less reliable. Most of the "win" in ca…

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by ziddoap »

gosub100 wrote: post #44
ziddoap wrote: 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.

>If you operate in the confines of the law that's all that matters.

This is uh.. Yeah. This is what I meant by having no moral or ethical qualms.

There are things that I find immoral which are not illegal. I do not do those things, even though legally I could.

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

#56

Post by whatshisface »

Aurornis wrote: post #28
sixhobbits wrote: post #6

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

> it used to be pretty positively received on HN I think people love the idea of DoNotPay: A magical internet machine that saves people money and fights back against evil corporations. Before ChatGPT they were basically mad libs for finding and filling out the right form. Helpful for people who couldn't figure out how to navigate situations by themselves. There is real value in this. However, they've also been runnin…

There's altruism, running a business, and unrestrained avarice. Sometimes libertarians can be as prone to equating the first two as leftists are the latter.

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

#57

Post by faangguyindia »

snakeyjake wrote: post #48
nashashmi wrote: post #30

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 ripo…

> it's not about trivial vs not trivial.

It's about how common the code is which you are asking the AI to generate and how much contextual clues it has to get the generation right.

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

#58

Post by ziddoap »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #52
ziddoap wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing gross or deceptive. They just had to pay a fine for deceptive advertising. The article lists a number of other deceptive and immoral business practices.

I actually used the service in question during that time frame and did not feel deceived by their advertising. In fact, I felt good enough about the experience that I threw them a few bucks after the fact to compensate them for some of the value that they gave me. You read an article about it and 7 years later and are convinced they are crooks.

I hold the FTC in higher regard than I do your personal experience when it comes to this matter.

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

#59

Post by whatshisface »

faangguyindia wrote: post #41
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #12

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.

The ship is sinking, and we're swimming towards the iceberg.

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

#60

Post by kstrauser »

manofmanysmiles wrote: post #14

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 a risk/reward issue. By analogy, I am perfectly capable of filling out an IRS 1040 form, so why pay a CPA? Because the CPA knows what things can be classified as business expenses. They have first-hand knowledge of which items have passed audits and which the IRS dismissed as farfetched. You're paying for someone who has the insider knowledge to navigate a minefield of non-obvious questions.

Or for a technical analogy, I'm capable of learning any programming language you can throw at me. However, a business who wants to hire someone is going to prefer someone with experience in that language's entire ecosystem. It's not enough to know the syntax. That's the easy part. The harder part is knowing which parts to reference at a given time, which modules experienced devs would choose to solve a specific problem, etc.

Well, same here. I'm wholly capable of reading and understanding the words of a contract or a summons or a lawsuit. What I don't know is the significance of specific phrases in those things, or what I'm allowed to use as evidence on my own behalf, or which issues I might raise that a judge would dismiss as something learned in the first semester of law school. And that's why I'd pay a lawyer to address legal issues for me.

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