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

arstechnica.com

71–80 of 218 posts

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

#71
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

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

#72

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…

>they're just another startup playing the growth hacking game

When is humanity going to start seeing some patches against these exploits? Is common sense still in beta?

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

#73

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.

You can get very far in life by just reading the contract, even farther by googling some context, and even farther by hiring an expert in the field.

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

#74

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.

It's not a question of how easy it is to automate it. It's about how frequent and costly the mistakes are. Lawyer AI is a high bar - plus the people watching you are human lawyers, exactly the kind of people who can make your mistakes more costly.

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

#75
post #7

"In 2021, Browder reported that DoNotPay had 250K subscribers; in May 2023, Browder said that DoNotPay had “well over 200,000 subscribers”. To date, DoNotPay has resolved over 2 million cases and offers over 200 use cases on its website. Though DoNotPay has not disclosed its revenue, it charges $36 every two months. Given this, it can be estimated that DoNotPay is generating $54 million in annual revenue, assuming th…

This is founder-raising-funds math (or VC looking for liquidity math). 200k subscribers might not mean paid subs and it certainly doesn't mean 1-year of paid subs. This could be $9M (a single-month of 250 paid subs) or lower.

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

#77

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.

>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?

The service it purported to offer is licensed. We could sit around and talk shit about the threshold to be licensed, the bar association, or licensing in general. But that's all distraction.

The point is the legal system has implemented a quality standard for providing certain services. There is a new thing providing the same service in novel way. Why wouldn't the legal system expect proof of quality?

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

#79
post #66
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a little bit how the law works. If you get sentenced for a conviction, your good deeds will affect the decision. Sometimes people get off entirely based on who they are (e.g. athletes, execs, etc).

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

#80
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

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