Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

201–210 of 218 posts

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

#201
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.

The average chatgpt legal brief just makes up case law, which is definitely not an improvement even over the worst attorneys out there.

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

#202
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is that your experience with traffic tickets?

Sure - when I was a kid, I was speeding in a neighborhood (think 40 in a 30) and an annoyed cop charged me with reckless driving. The public defender recommended I plead guilty, pay a large fine and be put on probation for a year. I think a more expensive lawyer would have had different advice.

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

#204
What a title: "DoNotPay has to pay."

Can't they ask ChatGPT to write some objection and, at the end of the prompt, put "but make it look like it was written by a lawyer" and send that to the court to waive the fine?

Please read my comment as a joke. The title really sounds funny!

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

#205
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.

This is my issue with AI. We know it spits out nonsense sometimes. Not just random questions, but even code generation.

It will no doubt improve, but somebody has to confirm that there are no errors in the output. If it has 1 error in 10,000 now, let's say it has a 3 log improvement, so now it's 1 in 1 million.

Would that be ok for legal or medical decisions? I don't think so. How about business decisions? Nope.

As long as AI is generating output with errors, it's going to have limited use.

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

#206
post #35

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.

The race to the bottom in the ruthless and relentless pursuit of profit is what soured us on tech, and the AI hype train is but one in a long procession.

> The race to the bottom in the ruthless and relentless pursuit of profit

Welcome to humanity.

You could blame capitalism, but it happened there too. In fact in every system.

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

#207
post #72

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?

Natural selection results in species succeeding that do some pretty brutal things. Natural selection also applies to religions, governments, and startups.

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

#208

Earlier 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. 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 th…

> 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.

Public corruption is intrinsic to government action, but the way you constrain it isn't by passing laws that limit the public, it's by limiting what laws can be passed by the government.

> I had in mind the part of the "media" which "rebels against the media", Noam Chomskies and Michael Moores of the world.

Chomsky probably isn't a great example of over-simplifying things. Many of his criticisms are legitimate.

But having a legitimate criticism of the status quo is a different thing than having a viable solution.

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

#209
post #72

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?

Humanity isn't ready for communism yet :(

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "brave" a euphemism for stupid.

I can think of very few situations where someone would say "wow that's brave" and not mean "wow you're an idiot"

[dead]
Post reply on HN