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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

#141

Post by notatoad »

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?

>When is humanity going to start seeing some patches against these exploits?

i think that's called "consequences" and it's the subject of the article you're commenting on

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

#142

Post by superfrank »

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?

Never?

The term "snake oil salesman" has been around since the 1800s and that's effectively what most of these growth hackers are. I'm sure there are plenty of terms for the same practice of fraudulent marketing that predate that by centuries or even millennia. If you can hype people up enough about what you're selling and get them imagining how much better their live's will be using your product a certain number will buy into anything (in DNPs case, people imagine how much time and money they'll save on not using a lawyer).

I wouldn't expect that to ever change.

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

#143

Post by bloodyplonker22 »

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.

To prove that that DoNotPay does not work, they will use DoNotPay on themselves to defend against this case.

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

#144

Post by ratg13 »

notatoad wrote: post #141
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 is humanity going to start seeing some patches against these exploits? i think that's called "consequences" and it's the subject of the article you're commenting on

Yes, but the eternal cycle is: gain trust and then exploit trust.

Some people gain enough trust that once they start to exploit it, that there often isn’t a mechanism to apply consequences.

i.e. - politics

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

#146

Post by gosub100 »

ziddoap wrote: post #55
gosub100 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

so religious zealotry? man-in-the-sky said "no do that!" ?

"This is uh.. Yeah." - can you clarify this remark please?

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

#147

Post by KronisLV »

sixhobbits wrote: post #6
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.

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's something I personally find very bizarre, but I've definitely noticed that a lot of people have a very strong mental block about doing things on a computer, or even a browser.

It's interesting that many have expressed something similar in regards to the current LLMs, for programming for example: that even if their output isn't exactly ideal, they still lower the barrier of entry for trying to do certain things, like starting a project in Python from scratch in a stack that you aren't entirely familiar with yet.

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

#148

Post by debarshri »

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.

Donotpay should have used donotpay to fight FTC ruling back. That would have been the ultimate outcome if they would have won.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

natch wrote: post #130
BarryMilo wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by abenga »

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.

> What is the purpose of a lawyer?

This is a good question. Is the point of paying the lawyer the piece of "intellectual output" (contract, specific advice, legal briefs, etc) or the fact that they stand behind it? Is a company using AI liable if the agents sell something for a pittance? Do the AI agents have intent and standing?

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