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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

#91

Post by swores »

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.

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

Actually, you read an article and assumed that your anecdotal experience from 7 years ago is more reflective of how a business operates than a current year investigation into that company by a federal agency.

Nobody is arguing that they deceived you personally 7 years ago.

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

#92

Post by adventured »

thrance wrote: post #83
whatshisface wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In your world, it seems the leftists have it figured out. The purpose of a business is always to maximize profit. EDIT: yeah, yeah, I hear you. You can survive on VC money, and maximize share price instead of focusing on profit. You can also be a small business owned by good people just trying to make a living, but then you still have to not get drowned out by more ruthless competition. The purpose of a business is n…

> The purpose of a business is always to maximize profit.

That's false. The purpose of a business is whatever the owners of that business decide. I've known a large number of business owners that chose less profit in exchange for any number of other attributes they valued more than max profit: more of their own time (working less), better serving a local community by donating a lot of resources / air time (media company), paying employees abnormally higher wages (because said employees had been with them a long time and loyalty matters to some people a lot) - and so on and so forth.

Max profit is one of a zillion possible attributes to optionally optimize for as the owner of a business. The larger the owner the more say they obviously will tend to have in the culture.

Facebook as a prominent public example, hasn't been optimized for max profit at any point in the past decade. They easily could have extracted far more profit than what they did. Zuckerberg, being the voting control shareholder, chose to invest hilariously vast amounts of money into eg the Metaverse / VR. He did that on a personal lark bet, with very little evidence to suggest it would assist in maximizing profit (and at the least he was very wrong in the closer-term 10-15 year span; maybe it'll pay off 20-30 years out, doubtful).

The pursuit of max profit is a cultural attribute, a choice, and that's all. It's generally neither a legal requirement nor a moral requirement of a business.

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

#93

Post by RustySpottedCat »

lolinder wrote: post #68
Palmik wrote: post #61

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.

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.

As is the case with this exact company " Fight Corporations Beat Bureaucracy Find Hidden Money " this is exactly and entirely the thing a exploiting company would say it does.

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

#94

Post by robertlagrant »

LegitShady wrote: post #82
zahlman wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

when the government regulates it. until then it will continue to the end of time.

There are already laws for false advertising.

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

#95

Post by AStonesThrow »

thrance wrote: post #83
whatshisface wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In your world, it seems the leftists have it figured out. The purpose of a business is always to maximize profit. EDIT: yeah, yeah, I hear you. You can survive on VC money, and maximize share price instead of focusing on profit. You can also be a small business owned by good people just trying to make a living, but then you still have to not get drowned out by more ruthless competition. The purpose of a business is n…

It's funny: the profit thing keeps being parroted here of all places, Y Combinator, when we know all too well that there are scads of businesses, especially today, that are bleeding millions and hemorrhaging cash, just to disrupt an industry sector, just to amass assets/user data, or just to amass a customer base and get sold off.

So no, profit is not a universal motive. But it's a popular one; if you have a conventional business and you expect to stay solvent year-over-year, then you make profits, you stay in the black, yes? Nobody can prognosticate when the lean years will come, and so you watch that bottom line and keep as much cushion as possible, to ride out a bad year or two.

Furthermore, if a business is competing with other businesses, that's going to moderate the profit motive with market share and other considerations. But I would say that publicly-traded companies have the strongest impetus to profit and satisfy shareholders. The publicly-traded space is far more constrained than other businesses or entities, such as charities, public interest groups, political action, NGOs, etc.

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

#96

Post by omoikane »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #69
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.

Is "brave" a euphemism for stupid.

I heard it's the British way of saying "that's insane".

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574974/etymology...

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

#97

Post by Narhem »

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.

Crazy people take any advice from people without citing the exact legal clause.

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

#98

Post by manofmanysmiles »

probably_wrong wrote: post #39
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.

> that "law" is some kind of magic... Law is some kind of magic, though. Consider the case where I want to cast the "Lawyer" protection spell. If I chant "I am invoking my right to remain silent. I want to contact my attorney" then the police must stop questioning me and provide me one [1]. The spell worked. If I chant "This is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give…

This is precisely the madness that I'm astounded by. Most people think this is sane, normal and moral.

And, I imagine most people reading this think I'm either insane, ignorant or uneducated, or will attach some other adjectives to further alienate me. It's okay, I already feel like an alien.

I'm not looking for an argument. I don't need to convince anyone.

I was hoping for a more receptive audience. Oh well.

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

#99

Post by alexey-salmin »

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.

Given how bad an average attorney is, I wonder if chatgpt would actually be an improvement.
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