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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

#121

Post by dylan604 »

zahlman wrote: post #72
Aurornis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Is common sense still in beta?

Common sense has been deprecated. The system is just waiting for all of the modules with common sense preinstalled to sunset.

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

#122

Post by BarryMilo »

dboreham wrote: post #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.

Truly one of the worst takes on AI I've seen. What is the purpose of a lawyer? It's not to read the law, the text is free (or should be). It's to advise you, based on the law but also on the immediate, historical and sociopolitical coontext, as well as on their understanding of the characters of all the humans involved.

If that gets automated, we are in AGI territory.

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

#123

Post by kbolino »

adventured wrote: post #92
thrance wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

A majority of the shares in most publicly traded corporations are held by retirement funds, both "private" (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) and public (FERS, CalPERS, ...). These entities, generally, have no appreciable interest other than maximizing profit. They are all regulated financial entities, even the private ones are quasi-governmental (e.g., BlackRock has close business relationships with the Federal Reserve), and the public ones are just straight up government agencies.

So, in a pretty real way, there is a legal requirement, though like many such things in the United States today, it is not properly formalized.

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

#124

Post by shadowgovt »

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.

Pretty classic hacker behavior. "This sucks. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make it better because everyone else working on it is an idiot and I, alone, see the True Way Forward."

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

#125

Post by shadowgovt »

miah_ wrote: post #26
thfuran wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the tech crowd getting soured on tech by all the ads eating the world?

Basically every action the big tech companies FAANG, MS, HP etc have all done for the past decade+ has been detrimental to users. Oh sure yes I want ads in my Operating System and I want every browser to be Chrome with a mask, oh right I also want to pay a subscription to use a printer. Just absolutely bonkers brains in power at tech companies lately.

Actually, of all of these, every browser being Chrome with a mask has been kind of nice as a web developer. Never have I had to invest fewer resources in wrestling browser quirks to the ground.

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

#126

Post by bongodongobob »

gortok wrote: post #107
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 Doesn’t that call into question the decision making of folks on HN rather than being a positive view of the product?

Yep. Turns out HN is just avg people that think they're really smart because they know how to write code.

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

#128

Post by gleenn »

glial wrote: post #84
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?

Ideally the legal system wouldn't be byzantine and prohibitively expensive for mere mortals to engage with.

I think the same could be said software engineers. I don't engage with the general public about writing people's next brilliant idea because it's a hige waste of my time when I could be making FAANG bucks talking to people who know that I'm worth it. While I will alwatry to explain to my mom how the internet works etc, it's not economically justifiable to engage laymen tonsolve their probno matter how altruistic it may seem. I still have to pay the bills. How are lawyers any different?

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

#129

Post by throwaway918299 »

ziddoap wrote: post #15
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. In this particular case, I'm not sour because of OpenAI. I am sour because of deceptive and gross business practices highlighted in the article.

I'm not soured on tech. I'm soured on the tech industry. I think there's quite a difference between these two things.

Using OpenAI as an example. ChatGPT is wonderful for the things it's made for. It's a tool, and a great one but that's all it is.

But OpenAI itself is a terrible company and Sam Altman is a power hungry conman that borders on snakeoil salesman.

And I'm soured on people like the CEO of my company who wants to shove a GPT chatbot into our application to do things that it's not at all good at or made for because they see dollar signs.

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

#130

Post by natch »

BarryMilo wrote: post #122
dboreham wrote: post #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.

Truly one of the worst takes on AI I've seen. What is the purpose of a lawyer? It's not to read the law, the text is free (or should be). It's to advise you, based on the law but also on the immediate, historical and sociopolitical coontext, as well as on their understanding of the characters of all the humans involved. If that gets automated, we are in AGI territory.

Your first paragraph with very small tweaks (laws of physics etc., not law) could also apply to human attendants in elevators.

The second paragraph… hard to make a call on that one.

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