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DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
191–200 of 218 posts
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example the American Bar Association has consistently created simple model statute frameworks that eventually are adopted. "Simple" is not an accurate description of typical model legislation. > Law is complex because society is complex. Law is complex because it's an evolved system influenced by politics and corruption. The extent of its complexity is not intrinsic and much of it is specifically a defense mech…
Your description is not consistent with history. Politics and corruption are not outsized drivers of law. Especially case law built through the courts. It’s all edge cases. Try the example of drafting a standard apartment lease, over millions of transactions between landlords and tenants lots of edge cases emerge. So over time leases get more complicated. And then the law around interpretation and enforcement gets co…
> Politics and corruption are not outsized drivers of law. Especially case law built through the courts. It’s all edge cases.
Case law is full of politics. How do you think courts resolve the ambiguities? If there was an objective standard for how to do it then judges could be replaced by computer programs. Judges are used instead because rigorous and consistent application of rules would lead to outcomes that are politically inexpedient, so judges only apply the rules as written when politics fails to require something different.
> Try the example of drafting a standard apartment lease, over millions of transactions between landlords and tenants lots of edge cases emerge. So over time leases get more complicated.
This is just a facet of how contracts and lawyers work. The law creates defaults that a contractual agreement can override, so each time the law establishes a default that landlords don't like but are allowed to change, they add a new clause to the lease to turn it back the other way. What they really want is a simple one-liner that says all disputes the law allows to be resolved in favor of the landlord, will be. But politics doesn't allow them to get away with that because what they're doing would be too clear to the public, so politics requires them to achieve the result they want through an opacifying layer of complexity.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example the American Bar Association has consistently created simple model statute frameworks that eventually are adopted. "Simple" is not an accurate description of typical model legislation. > Law is complex because society is complex. Law is complex because it's an evolved system influenced by politics and corruption. The extent of its complexity is not intrinsic and much of it is specifically a defense mech…
"Politics and corruption" is exactly what is complex about society, and it is absolutely intristic to society. That's why we have laws in the first place. > because the public wouldn't support many things in the status quo if they understood the workings of them Personally, I've observed the opposite more often: somebody feeds the public a clickbait-ey and manipulative "explanation" of how things work, and public bec…
> "Politics and corruption" is exactly what is complex about society, and it is absolutely intristic to society. That's why we have laws in the first place.
The reason we have laws is to facilitate corruption? That seems like something we ought not to want.
> Personally, I've observed the opposite more often: somebody feeds the public a clickbait-ey and manipulative "explanation" of how things work, and public becomes enraged without any real understanding of complexities and trade-offs of the system, as well as unintended consequences of proposed "fixes".
That's the media. The government over-complicates things. The media over-simplifies things.
It has the same cause. People tune out when something becomes so complicated they can't understand it. So if they want people to pay attention to them, they over-simplify things. If they want people to ignore what they're doing, they over-complicate things.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Their point still stands though. If the output should be reviewed by a lawyer, then the penalty should be all the profits (and maybe also the wages of the CEO) to deter others from doing the same, and ensure that they don't continue in the belief that an occasional 1-2% is perfectly acceptable 'cost of doing business'.
I think we need to start taking this sort of thing beyond money. I'm not sure if it's warranted in this case, but in general I'd like to see more shareholders going to jail for things their companies did.
If my dog bites somebody, that's on me. It should be no different with a company.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Literally why I stopped going to the comments or commenting. The blind arrogance of tech bros is up there.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
People that can understand the difference between right and wrong can’t really explain this to people who only understand the idea of what is legally permissible.
It’s not about whether the explanation is rational. It’s just that if you really think the law is the last word on ethics and morality then you must be so self interested or ignorant or evil that you’re already not in a position to understand any explanation that’s offered.
As a simple example, should we teach children to not lie, or explain that the real error is to get caught telling a lie that didn’t even maximize their profit potential? Do you want corporations or individuals that shape society to be better moral actors than children, or worse?
If you don’t understand this kind of thing already, it must be willful.. retreating to the letter of the law in simple situations like this to plead moral and ethical agnosticism is such a transparent and weak position, rhetorically. Everyone knows that you just plan to profit from your willingness to engage in some kind of bad behavior.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#197"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…
> $193K seems like a pittance compared to the money they're making off of this. I don't have any special knowledge of this specific case, but it's important to note as a general principle that often the point of these fines is as the start of a process. It creates a formal legal record of actual damages and judgement, but the government doesn't see massive harm done yet nor think the business should be dead entirely.…
> DoNotPay accepted no liability.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You mentioned that you don’t understand the magical thinking, but then someone shows that the proper incantation matters more than the sentiment or intent. That’s why you see magical thinking. We all want a world where the earnest desire for rescue matters more than words in the request, because while sometimes we know the right words, sometimes we don’t. If you think you always know the right words and everyone else should too, that’s not reasonable and this should be obvious for many reasons along the lines of differences in intelligence, jurisdiction, language difficulties, etc
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Politics and corruption" is exactly what is complex about society, and it is absolutely intristic to society. That's why we have laws in the first place. > because the public wouldn't support many things in the status quo if they understood the workings of them Personally, I've observed the opposite more often: somebody feeds the public a clickbait-ey and manipulative "explanation" of how things work, and public bec…
> "Politics and corruption" is exactly what is complex about society, and it is absolutely intristic to society. That's why we have laws in the first place. The reason we have laws is to facilitate corruption? That seems like something we ought not to want. > Personally, I've observed the opposite more often: somebody feeds the public a clickbait-ey and manipulative "explanation" of how things work, and public become…
> The reason we have laws is to facilitate corruption? That seems like something we ought not to want.
No, the reason we have laws is because politics and corruption and crime is intristic to society. They are the reality of human condition which can't go away and we can't ignore, so we have to deal with it.
> That's the media. The government over-complicates things. The media over-simplifies things.
I had in mind the part of the "media" which "rebels against the media", Noam Chomskies and Michael Moores of the world.
Re: DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer, FTC says
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It worked as well as any other eighteen dollar a month lawyer back when I tried it in 2017/2018. It was actually free back then I used it the one time and felt grateful enough for the help that I signed up for one cycle and then cancelled (since I didn't have a continued need for it). Nothing gross or deceptive.
This. Try being broke and able to get some advice and consultation with trepidation. I think its fine as long as more clearly labeled not legal advice or counsel but experiment tool.