The legal system has a great sense of self preservation. They will surely fight anything that possibly encroaches on their domain, especially things that give non lawyers the tools to defend themselves without feeding the machine.
DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
61–70 of 218 posts
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#62> 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.
Did they help regular people defend themselves while saving on legal costs or not?
Most of these cases wouldn't be defended at all otherwise.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#63Earlier 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
Not sure about the history, I based my comment on this quote from the article: > [...] DoNotPay's legal service [...] relying on an API with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Perhaps they rolled their own chatbot then later switched to ChatGPT? Either way, they probably should have a lawyer involved at some point in the process.
Yes I think you are right about that. Someone else called it "mad libs" and that is very much what it felt like back in 2017/18.
Idk why they needed to have a lawyer involved though. Many processes in life just need an "official" sounding response: to get to the next phase, or open the gate to talk to a real human, or even to close the issue with a positive result.
Many people are not able to conjure up an "official" sounding response from nothing, so these chatbot/ChatGPTs are great ways for them to generate a response to use for their IRL need (parking ticket, letter to landlord, etc).
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#64It'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…
There's a difference, though. Law and medicine are fields with very strong gatekeeping. You also need a licence for many construction engineering roles, and in fact both stakes and accountability there are much higher than in the former two (in fact, it is a bit appalling, how little lawyers and doctors are hold accountable for stupid shit they do, if they follow the playbook), and realistically you need to learn as much if not more to be a good construction engineer (but most construction engineers are not especially good, just as most lawyers and doctors aren't very good), but you don't see so much reverence towards construction engineers, and there are much fewer artificial borders for one to learn construction engineering.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#65> 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.
Did they help regular people defend themselves while saving on legal costs or not? Most of these cases wouldn't be defended at all otherwise.
This is exactly the right question.
Did they provide value to the user? Yes, nearly any situation in life involving money can be improved with a top lawyer on retainer, but that isn't always viable or economical
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#66> 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.
Did they help regular people defend themselves while saving on legal costs or not? Most of these cases wouldn't be defended at all otherwise.
>Did they help regular people defend themselves while saving on legal costs or not?
Do you get a free pass to do shitty things as long as you do some good things too?
I am totally onboard with the concept of the business, just not this particular implementation of it.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair if legal paperwork follows a standard process with standard information, a "robot" can complete many orders of magnitude more than any human lawyer. (I'm also not a lawyer and have no idea if this line of thinking is applicable.)
Honestly most lawyers (that I know at least) just keep templates of most common documents and fill in the blanks as needed For basic stuff this is 95% of the end product
I guarantee it’s going to be impossible to compete as a lawyer in most fields without doing most of the work with LLMs, probably within a few years.
I expect the benefits of increased efficiency will be seen as temporarily zeroed inflation for legal services (prices actually going down? LOL) and a bunch of rents, forever (more or less, from the perspective of a human lifetime) to whichever one or two companies monopolize the relevant feature sets (see also: the situation with digital access to legal documents). Lawyers will be more productive but I expect comp will stay about the same.
And I think that as someone fairly pessimistic about the whole AI thing.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#68The legal system has a great sense of self preservation. They will surely fight anything that possibly encroaches on their domain, especially things that give non lawyers the tools to defend themselves without feeding the machine.
Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. Many organizations that purport to be helping the little guy are actually just exploiting them for profit.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#69> 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.
Is "brave" a euphemism for stupid.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Actually, I think they are the opposite of contradictory. This tech is dumb, funny, new, and maybe it has potential in the right (low-stakes) applications.
Meanwhile, I dunno, I have some begrudging admiration for the folks getting rich selling premium GEMMs, but eventually they are going to piss off all their investors and cause a giant mess. Like good luck guys, get that money, but please don’t take us all down with you.