[HN Gopher] DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untest...
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DoNotPay has to pay $193K for falsely touting untested AI lawyer,
FTC says
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 234 points
Date : 2024-09-26 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| flutas wrote:
| Honestly not that surprised, the only surprising thing to me is
| how little of a slap on the wrist this feels like.
|
| It felt like a shaky premise at best as far back as I can
| remember. Even "standard" things often have many intricacies that
| a person might not know to say, and it may not let them know/ask
| them about it.
|
| As an example, think of all the questions TurboTax et. al ask
| about taxes.
| monkaiju wrote:
| Good, AI shouldn't be anywhere near anything where accountability
| matters...
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _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.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| 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
| ziddoap wrote:
| Not sure about the history, I based my comment on this quote
| from the article:
|
| > _[...] DoNotPay 's legal service [...] relying on an API
| with OpenAI's ChatGPT._
|
| Perhaps they rolled their own chatbot then later switched to
| ChatGPT? Either way, they probably should have a lawyer
| involved at some point in the process.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| My understanding is that they had much more linear
| automation of very specific, narrow, high-frequency
| processes -- basically form letters plus some process
| automation -- before they got GPT and decided they could do
| a lot more "lawyer" things with it.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Yes I think you are right about that. Someone else called
| it "mad libs" and that is very much what it felt like back
| in 2017/18.
|
| Idk why they needed to have a lawyer involved though. Many
| processes in life just need an "official" sounding
| response: to get to the next phase, or open the gate to
| talk to a real human, or even to close the issue with a
| positive result.
|
| Many people are not able to conjure up an "official"
| sounding response from nothing, so these chatbot/ChatGPTs
| are great ways for them to generate a response to use for
| their IRL need (parking ticket, letter to landlord, etc).
| everforward wrote:
| "Lawyer" is a regulated term that comes with a lot of
| expectations of the "lawyer" (liability for malpractice,
| a bunch of duties, etc). You can't just say that
| something is a lawyer any more than you could do the same
| with doctors or police officers.
|
| Machines are also not allowed to be the "author" of court
| documents if they actually get to court (so far as I'm
| aware). A lawyer has to sign off and claim it as their
| own work, and doing so without the lawyer reading it is
| pretty taboo (I think maybe sanctionable by the BAR but I
| could be wrong).
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| >You can't just say that something is a lawyer any more
| than you could do the same with doctors or police
| officers
|
| Do you think WebMD should be renamed? Lawyers seem to be
| better at defending their turf than doctors or cops.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| 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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _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.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| 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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _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.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| 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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| I hold the FTC in higher regard than I do your personal
| experience when it comes to this matter.
| swores wrote:
| > _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.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| haha touche. That's a fair thing to say
| freejazz wrote:
| You seem to continue to be deceived as you continue to
| describe the service as if it is a lawyer
| freejazz wrote:
| > It worked as well as any other eighteen dollar a month
| lawyer
|
| It wasn't an eighteen dollar a month lawyer, so your
| description of it as "any other" is wrong.
| throwaway918299 wrote:
| 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| Wasn't the tech crowd getting soured on tech by all the ads
| eating the world?
| miah_ wrote:
| 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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| AI helps our lives in many ways and it's a shame that the
| LLM era has perverted the term with the same bad smells and
| scamminess of the NFT era.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| It goes both ways. AI is used in both benefic ways as
| well as malefic ones. I don't think it's a net positive
| but that's just my opinion.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > To your second point, it's very funny how OpenAI seems to
| have soured the tech crowd on tech.
|
| They represent an amplifier for the enshittening that was
| already souring the tech crown on tech.
|
| LLM's used in this sort of way, which is exactly OpenAI's
| trillion dollar bet, will just make products appear to have
| larger capabilities while simultaneously making many
| capabilities far less reliable.
|
| Most of the "win" in cases like this is for the product
| vendor cutting capital costs of development while inflating
| their marketability in the short term, at the expense of
| making everything they let it touch get more unpredictable
| and inconsistent. Optimistic/naive users jump in for the
| market promise of new and more dynamic features, but aren't
| being coached to anticipate the tradeoff.
|
| It's the same thing we've been seeing in digital products
| for the last 15 years, and manufactured products for the
| last 40, but cranked up by an order of magnitude.
|
| It's exhausting and disheartening.
| faangguyindia wrote:
| 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.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| You can simultanously believe that AI:
|
| * Is massively overhyped by certain persons and
| companies, and
|
| * Is both interesting and has loads of promise, so is
| worth working on in your own time
|
| They aren't contradictory at all.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Actually, I think they are the opposite of contradictory.
| This tech is dumb, funny, new, and maybe it has potential
| in the right (low-stakes) applications.
|
| Meanwhile, I dunno, I have some begrudging admiration for
| the folks getting rich selling premium GEMMs, but
| eventually they are going to piss off all their investors
| and cause a giant mess. Like good luck guys, get that
| money, but please don't take us all down with you.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The ship is sinking, and we're swimming towards the
| iceberg.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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."
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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 running the same growth hacking
| playbooks that people disdain: False advertising, monthly
| subscriptions for services that most people need in a one-off
| manner, claiming AI features to be more reliable than they
| are, releasing untested products on consumers. Once you look
| past the headline of the company you find they're not
| entirely altruistic, they're just another startup playing the
| growth hacking game and all that comes with it.
| whatshisface wrote:
| 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.
| thrance wrote:
| 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 not _always_ to maximize
| profit.
| dpassens wrote:
| The purpose of a business is whatever its owners want it
| to be. Typically, this is maximizing profit, but it could
| be anything, like getting paid for what you like to do.
| adventured wrote:
| > 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.
| kbolino wrote:
| 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.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| >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?
| LegitShady wrote:
| when the government regulates it. until then it will
| continue to the end of time.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| There are already laws for false advertising.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| In America? Barely. EVERYTHING can be called "puffery",
| which apparently makes it perfectly legal to make
| outright lies about your product, and if you instead
| merely pay someone who makes outright lies, apparently
| that's fine too if you didn't explicitly tell them to
| make those specific lies!
|
| In America, it is legal to call your uncarbonated soft
| drink "vitamin water"!
| glial wrote:
| Ideally the legal system wouldn't be byzantine and
| prohibitively expensive for mere mortals to engage with.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Too bad that the legal system is made of lawyers, whose
| interests run directly contrary to that ideal.
| digitaltrees wrote:
| Legal systems becoming complex predates the emergence of
| lawyers.
|
| Lawyers have also led significant efforts to simplify the
| law. For example the American Bar Association has
| consistently created simple model statute frameworks that
| eventually are adopted.
|
| Law is complex because society is complex.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Reminds me of the expression "in and of itself".
| gleenn wrote:
| 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?
| glial wrote:
| Lawyers are the interface between the public and the
| justice system -- which would exist whether software did
| or not. It's an access and equity issue: people with
| money have access to the legal system. People without
| largely don't.
| freejazz wrote:
| Is that your experience with traffic tickets?
| szundi wrote:
| Human lifespan is too short
| RankingMember wrote:
| Yep, need some way to image each new brain that comes
| online with some basics so it's not starting from 0 each
| time (and what basics to include would be a battle for
| the ages)
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Oof, no thanks. Part of our resilience comes from each
| generation observing and learning what the world actually
| is without _all_ of the dogma from the previous
| generation. Instilling a set of basics is probably the
| worst thing we could do to fight against gaming humanity.
| ruined wrote:
| you've just described public school
| dylan604 wrote:
| > 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.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > common sense still in beta?
|
| Common sense was relegated to a legacy feature status
| after "clout" and "fuck you got mine" were released.
|
| It will not see further updates and will be sunset
| shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience.
| notatoad wrote:
| >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
| ratg13 wrote:
| 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
| zahlman wrote:
| What I was getting at is: legal protections are good and
| necessary and all, but people try these things presumably
| because they work sometimes, and that fact bothers me.
| The idea that current generative AI tech - even if it
| were actually built to purpose - could actually fight for
| you in court, or output legal briefs that hold up to
| scrutiny and don't require review by a human expert,
| seems laughable to me. Law is definitely not a suitable
| field for an agent that frequently "hallucinates" and
| never questions or second-guesses your requests. There's
| so much that would have to go into such an AI system to
| be reliable, beyond the actual prose generation, that I
| certainly wouldn't _a priori_ expect it to exist in 2024.
|
| If so many people are willing to take the claim at face
| value, that suggests to me a general naivete and lack of
| understanding of AI out there that really needs to be
| fixed.
|
| Aside from AI-related stuff, GGP mentioned "monthly
| subscriptions for services that most people need in a
| one-off manner". It's amazing to me that anyone would
| sign up for a monthly subscription _to anything at all_ ,
| without any consideration for whether they'd likely have
| a use for it every month.
| superfrank wrote:
| 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.
| gortok wrote:
| > 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?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Yep. Turns out HN is just avg people that think they're
| really smart because they know how to write code.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Given the scope of the topic it appealed in 2016, parking
| tickets in two specific cities, I can see such a petty case
| like that be automated. The expansion in 2017 to seeking
| refuge seems like it'd be a bigger hurdle. But I wouldn't
| be surprised if that process can be automated a lot as
| well.
|
| Seems like the killing blow here was claiming it can
| outright replace legal advice. Wonder how much that lie
| made compared to the settlement.
|
| But yes, HN in general is a lot more empathetic towards AI
| than what the average consensus seems to be based on
| surveys this year.
| hinkley wrote:
| On a long enough timeline we all (with the exception of
| narcissists) see our younger selves as little idiots.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > 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.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > it used to be pretty positively received on HN
|
| HN is a fickle beast
| ryandrake wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I think about this all the time. If I didn't have a conscience,
| I would be retired by now.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| You might be retiring in jail, though.
| rollcat wrote:
| Unfortunately, "if it's an app, it's legal".
| gosub100 wrote:
| > 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.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| so religious zealotry? man-in-the-sky said "no do that!" ?
|
| "This is uh.. Yeah." - can you clarify this remark please?
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _so religious zealotry? man-in-the-sky said "no do
| that!" ?_
|
| What are you on about?
|
| I refuse to compromise my morals just because something
| is legal. That's it.
|
| My morals did not come from some god, and they did not
| come from laws. No idea where you are getting religious
| zealotry from.
|
| > _" This is uh.. Yeah." - can you clarify this remark
| please?_
|
| Sure. I stopped myself from saying something rude to you.
| Palmik wrote:
| Did they help regular people defend themselves while saving on
| legal costs or not?
|
| Most of these cases wouldn't be defended at all otherwise.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| This is exactly the right question.
|
| Did they provide value to the user? Yes, nearly any situation
| in life involving money can be improved with a top lawyer on
| retainer, but that isn't always viable or economical
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Did they help regular people defend themselves while
| saving on legal costs or not?_
|
| Do you get a free pass to do shitty things as long as you do
| some good things too?
|
| I am totally onboard with the _concept_ of the business, just
| not this particular implementation of it.
| pb7 wrote:
| That's a little bit how the law works. If you get sentenced
| for a conviction, your good deeds will affect the decision.
| Sometimes people get off entirely based on who they are
| (e.g. athletes, execs, etc).
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _If you get sentenced for a conviction, your good deeds
| will affect the decision._
|
| Definitely a valid point, but I don't feel comfortable
| applying the same idea to inanimate entities like
| corporations.
|
| > _Sometimes people get off entirely based on who they
| are (e.g. athletes, execs, etc)._
|
| On a personal level, I have never agreed with this.
| freejazz wrote:
| In that one circumstance. You don't get to do a little
| murder because you donated to a charity. Why even bother
| to act like this is some sort of principle that
| underlines the legal system?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Is "brave" a euphemism for stupid.
| lexicality wrote:
| I can think of very few situations where someone would say
| "wow that's brave" and not mean "wow you're an idiot"
| omoikane wrote:
| I heard it's the British way of saying "that's insane".
|
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574974/etymology.
| ..
| Narhem wrote:
| Crazy people take any advice from people without citing the
| exact legal clause.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Then you must find it very frustrating to actually receive
| legal advice, because it is often more complicated than that
| and there sometimes is no such clause!
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| Given how bad an average attorney is, I wonder if chatgpt would
| actually be an improvement.
| exe34 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I invented smaller variants of deliveroo, airbnb and uber in my
| mind, around 2008, but I thought no, the only way to make any
| money would be to exploit people and break laws. honestly, what
| held me back was more the hassle of lawyers to make it all
| work. I didn't think I could stomach the effort.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| Another Silicon Valley startup looking to get rich quick,
| following in the footsteps of Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash,
| WeWork...etc, which have all played in the legal grey areas
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| To prove that that DoNotPay does not work, they will use
| DoNotPay on themselves to defend against this case.
| debarshri wrote:
| Donotpay should have used donotpay to fight FTC ruling back.
| That would have been the ultimate outcome if they would have
| won.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I'm not sure they mean "LLM based AI".
|
| To me it looks like they automated some boilerplate legal forms
| and marketted it as "AI" to capitalize on the hype.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _I 'm not sure they mean "LLM based AI"_
|
| The article states that they use ChatGPT.
| datavirtue wrote:
| What is morally or ethically wrong with what they did?
|
| Maybe it's morally or ethically wrong to prosecute them and
| take their belongings?
| ziddoap wrote:
| I consider boldly lying about the efficacy of your product in
| your advertisements to be unethical.
|
| You don't, I guess. That's fine.
| fortyseven wrote:
| Let's ask a chatbot and find out.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I am honestly surprised the fine is not more. We need to see more
| of these come out as AI is shoved dangerously into places thanks
| to the ability to use it with little to no technical knowledge.
|
| Especially when you are really just shoving data into an LLM and
| expecting a response to do some job, you are not training it to
| do a specific task.
|
| Like the home buying AI that was on HN yesterday.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The fine was about false advertising, not dangerousness. Three
| of the commissioners signed on to concurring statements
| emphasizing that they are not opposed in principle to the use
| of AI in law. (https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-
| proceedings/p...) (https://www.ftc.gov/legal-
| library/browse/cases-proceedings/p...)
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Link to related thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41638199
| gosub100 wrote:
| If a tenant is able to file a case that costs his corporate, PE
| owned landlord $25k to litigate, that's a win in my book.
| That's the same landlord who increased the rent 20% per year
| for the last 5 years because "the Market", well, Blackstone,
| welcome to the "market" where each eviction now costs you a
| collateral amount for ruining a hard working persons life.
| Imagine that, if there were a consequence to greed?
| gradyfps wrote:
| "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 that all 250K users subscribe for 1
| year."[1]
|
| $193K seems like a pittance compared to the money they're making
| off of this.
|
| [1]: https://research.contrary.com/company/donotpay
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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'.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Maybe $193k is all that the FTC felt could be attributed to
| the "deceptive business practices."
|
| It's weird to think that the FTC is right about the
| investigation, but somehow flubbed the penalty
| gradyfps wrote:
| Fair points. I hadn't considered that a trial subscription is
| still a subscriber.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| The main product actually works, this is for additional claims
| that were misleading. It isn't right to compare the settlement
| to the entire company revenue. Better to compare to the benefit
| gained by wrongdoing, or the amount of harm caused.
| xoa wrote:
| > _$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. They want a modification of
| certain practices going forward, and the expectation is that
| the company will immediately comply and that's the end of it.
|
| If instead the business simply paid the fine and flagrantly
| blew it off and did the exact same thing without so much as a
| fig leaf, round 2 would see the book thrown at them. Defiance
| of process and lawful orders is much easier to prove and has
| little to no wiggle room, regardless of the complexity that
| began an action originally. Same as an individual investigated
| for a crime who ends up with a section 1001 charge or other
| obstruction of justice and ends up in more trouble for that
| than the underlying cause of investigation.
|
| So yes, not necessarily a huge fine. But if there weren't huge
| actual damages that seems appropriate too, so long as the
| behavior doesn't repeat (and everyone else in the industry is
| on notice now too).
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| I love the quote they included in their ads, purportedly from the
| Los Angeles Time but "actually from a high-schooler's opinion
| piece in the Los Angeles Times' High School Insider":
|
| > _" what this robot lawyer can do is astonishingly similar--if
| not more--to what human lawyers do."_
| gradyfps wrote:
| To be fair if legal paperwork follows a standard process with
| standard information, a "robot" can complete many orders of
| magnitude more than any human lawyer. (I'm also not a lawyer
| and have no idea if this line of thinking is applicable.)
| raverbashing wrote:
| Honestly most lawyers (that I know at least) just keep
| templates of most common documents and fill in the blanks as
| needed
|
| For basic stuff this is 95% of the end product
| vundercind wrote:
| I guarantee it's going to be impossible to compete as a
| lawyer in most fields without doing _most_ of the work with
| LLMs, probably within a few years.
|
| I expect the benefits of increased efficiency will be seen
| as temporarily zeroed inflation for legal services (prices
| actually going down? LOL) and a bunch of rents, forever
| (more or less, from the perspective of a human lifetime) to
| whichever one or two companies monopolize the relevant
| feature sets (see also: the situation with digital access
| to legal documents). Lawyers will be more productive but I
| expect comp will stay about the same.
|
| And I think that as someone fairly pessimistic about the
| whole AI thing.
| woah wrote:
| And 95% of a doctor's job is just saying "your checkup
| looks OK Joe, just try to get some exercise and eat more
| fiber".
| saintfire wrote:
| And the other 4.99% they do that anyways, in my
| experience.
| sweeter wrote:
| Tbf it's almost always applicable. Get more rest, drink
| more water, exercise and have a better diet, is
| universally good advice.
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
| toast0 wrote:
| It's the same with plumbing, wiring, programing, writing,
| cooking, gardening, and most of the other verbs.
|
| For the most part, everyone can do these things, but it's nice
| to pay someome else to do it; especially in fields where
| experience gives expertise and hopefully wisdom. Also, it's
| handy to hire a licensed practicioner in fields where
| government requires licensure to sell services.
|
| Some people are really woried about making big mistakes that
| are expensive to clean when plumbing or wiring or lawyering.
| It's a legitimate thing to consider.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| It's a matter of opportunity costs as well. If you want to be
| able to do plumbing, wiring, framing... you likely don't also
| have the time to learn the potentially vast amount of
| knowledge required to adeptly navigate the legal system.
|
| > Some people are really woried about making big mistakes
| that are expensive to clean when plumbing or wiring or
| lawyering.
|
| Even worse, if you lawyer wrong (or wire wrong), you might
| not be able to clean it up - you just do your time or perhaps
| die.
| krick wrote:
| There's a difference, though. Law and medicine are fields
| with very strong gatekeeping. You also need a licence for
| many construction engineering roles, and in fact both stakes
| and accountability there are much higher than in the former
| two (in fact, it is a bit appalling, how little lawyers and
| doctors are hold accountable for stupid shit they do, if they
| follow the playbook), and realistically you need to learn as
| much if not more to be a good construction engineer (but most
| construction engineers are not especially good, just as most
| lawyers and doctors aren't very good), but you don't see so
| much reverence towards construction engineers, and there are
| much fewer artificial borders for one to learn construction
| engineering.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _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 me a lawyer dog
| 'cause this is not what's up" then my spell is not strong
| enough and the police can interrogate me as they see fit [2].
|
| And then there's the time where a wizard had to interpret a
| comma [3].
|
| [1] https://www.nedbarnett.com/do-i-have-a-right-to-an-
| attorney-...
|
| [2] https://uproxx.com/culture/louisiana-supreme-court-
| suspect-l...
|
| [3] https://www.loweringthebar.net/2017/03/the-oxford-comma-
| use-...
| manofmanysmiles wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It's a risk/reward issue. By analogy, I am perfectly capable of
| filling out an IRS 1040 form, so why pay a CPA? Because the CPA
| knows what things can be classified as business expenses. They
| have first-hand knowledge of which items have passed audits and
| which the IRS dismissed as farfetched. You're paying for
| someone who has the insider knowledge to navigate a minefield
| of non-obvious questions.
|
| Or for a technical analogy, I'm capable of learning any
| programming language you can throw at me. However, a business
| who wants to hire someone is going to prefer someone with
| experience in that language's entire ecosystem. It's not enough
| to know the syntax. That's the easy part. The harder part is
| knowing which parts to reference at a given time, which modules
| experienced devs would choose to solve a specific problem, etc.
|
| Well, same here. I'm wholly capable of reading and
| understanding the words of a contract or a summons or a
| lawsuit. What I _don 't_ know is the significance of specific
| phrases in those things, or what I'm allowed to use as evidence
| on my own behalf, or which issues I might raise that a judge
| would dismiss as something learned in the first semester of law
| school. And that's why I'd pay a lawyer to address legal issues
| for me.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| You can get very far in life by just reading the contract, even
| farther by googling some context, and even farther by hiring an
| expert in the field.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| This is a very sneaky ethically gray company. Their app is not
| only of terrible quality but also full of dark patterns. I'm
| convinced that any revenue they make comes from people who can't
| figure out how to cancel. Stay away from it.
| pnw wrote:
| Even before AI, that website has been making overly optimistic
| claims for many years. It was never clear to me how real or
| effective it was. The Wikipedia article has more detail but it
| seems like this is the first time the government has actually
| called them out?
|
| Of course this didn't stop them raising $10m from credulous
| investors in 2021.
| popcalc wrote:
| In 2021 a literal discord group raised several million dollars
| so take that into consideration.
| beerandt wrote:
| Has the chance to make their best marketing material yet.
| nashashmi wrote:
| FTC overreached here: the AI was not tested to see if it is like
| a lawyer's level of work. Why would anyone have to do this kind
| of study?
|
| Back in the day, anyone who touted AI generated works by default
| exclaimed that the work was not as good as a human. That changed
| now but was a valid statement back then.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Why would anyone have to do this kind of study?_
|
| Because the company chose to publish ads with misleading claims
| about the efficacy of their system.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| I have not seen any evidence that AI output can reach quality
| levels of a human.
|
| Any non-trivial code generated by it takes more time to debug
| than just writing it from scratch.
|
| Its "art" is abominably bad and repetitive.
|
| Text generated by AI reads like corporate ad copy written by
| several committees of committees.
|
| "Lovecraftian nightmare" best describes its video output.
|
| AI voice generation sounds like soulless ripoffs of famous
| voice actors (the Attenborough clone is the worst) with
| misplaced stresses and an off-putting cadence derived from
| being completely unable to understand the broader context of
| the work it is narrating.
|
| Its explanations on things are inferior to the first paragraph
| of any wikipedia article on the query topic.
|
| A child with a pirated copy of FL-Studio can make more
| interesting music.
|
| The wall being erected by AI customer service agents between a
| problem and an actual human who might be able to solve it is
| frustrating and useless.
|
| On top of all of that the answers it confidently gives (almost
| always with no sources) are often extremely wrong.
|
| Is there a secret AI product everyone is using that is actually
| good?
|
| Edit: AI is however extremely good at rapidly creating an
| endless stream of barely-passable content designed to distract
| very cheaply so I expect its use by marketing and social media
| firms to continue its meteoric rise.
| faangguyindia wrote:
| > it's not about trivial vs not trivial.
|
| It's about how common the code is which you are asking the AI
| to generate and how much contextual clues it has to get the
| generation right.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The Dagoth Ur voice generation is shockingly good. I found a
| youtube channel of Dagoth Ur narrating Lovecraft stories;
| it's as good as human narration IMHO.
| summermusic wrote:
| Yeah why would any company have to test the efficacy of their
| product before making claims about its efficacy?
|
| Snark aside, this is literally a quote from their marketing:
| "what this robot lawyer can do is astonishingly similar--if not
| more--to what human lawyers do."
|
| So to claim that they "exclaimed that the work was not as good
| as a human" is inaccurate.
| dogleash wrote:
| >AI was not tested to see if it is like a lawyer's level of
| work. Why would anyone have to do this kind of study?
|
| The service it purported to offer is licensed. We could sit
| around and talk shit about the threshold to be licensed, the
| bar association, or licensing in general. But that's all
| distraction.
|
| The point is the legal system has implemented a quality
| standard for providing certain services. There is a new thing
| providing the same service in novel way. Why wouldn't the legal
| system expect proof of quality?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Official release: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2024/09/...
| swalsh wrote:
| The problem with today's technology is it is indistinguishable
| from magic. Sometimes the magic is real, sometimes it's an
| illusion. It's nearly impossible as a regular consumer not deeply
| knowledgable of the current capabilities of models to know which
| is which.
| dboreham wrote:
| 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.
| zulban wrote:
| It's not a question of how easy it is to automate it. It's
| about how frequent and costly the mistakes are. Lawyer AI is a
| high bar - plus the people watching you are human lawyers,
| exactly the kind of people who can make your mistakes more
| costly.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| 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.
| natch wrote:
| 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.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| I think you'll find elevator attendance errors rather
| cheaper.
| abenga wrote:
| > 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_?
| Palmik wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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.
| RustySpottedCat wrote:
| 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.
| mcheung610 wrote:
| DoNoPay has to pay a fine is just an irony.
| abixb wrote:
| Haha, my thoughts precisely. The first 4 words of the title
| were bewildering for me for a few seconds.
| throwaway29812 wrote:
| Could they...employ their own services?
| yapyap wrote:
| oh the irony
| K0balt wrote:
| My bet is they won't pay.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Maybe they can use their own AI to get out of paying it?
| winddude wrote:
| '''"None of the Service's technologies has been trained on a
| comprehensive and current corpus of federal and state laws,
| regulations, and judicial decisions or on the application of
| those laws to fact patterns," the FTC found'''
|
| Wow!! That seems so simple, and literally a few weeks to do in
| today's ecosystem, now thoroughly testing make take a little more
| time, but wow, I wonder if it was evening attempting to do RAG.
| fudged71 wrote:
| Lawyer Kathryn Tewson on Twitter has been calling them out for a
| long time
| https://x.com/kathryntewson/status/1838995653630083086?s=46
| btbuildem wrote:
| Funny thing is, they're probably still ahead financially vs if
| they actually hired lawyers to do this on the up-and-up.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Yes, I get it they did a bad thing. But most of what they are
| setup to fight is people abusing the legal system so it's not
| unfair to fight fire with fire surely?
|
| As an example I parked my car to drop my daughter off at a party
| and paid online - but mistyped the little number for the car park
| and ended up paying for 3 hours parking somewhere across the
| country.
|
| Naturally the private car park tries to charge me 20x the parking
| fee as a "fine" - which they can whistle for frankly. But they
| sent varying letters that sound but don't actually say "court" or
| "legal action" (things like "solicitors action prior to court"
|
| I kept sending them the same answer they kept rejecting it
|
| Then they actually sued me in county court. Oh wow I thought I
| better pay. And as a court judgement is really bad on credit
| record (one above bankruptcy) it's serious. But I checked the
| court website anyway to be extra careful. And Incoukd challenge
| it - actually appear before the beak and say "hey it's not my
| fault".
|
| So I filled in the form that says "yes I will challenge it, see
| you in court"
|
| That might my wife said don't be fucking stupid they have won pay
| them
|
| So I went back the next day - and guess what - they had after 9
| months withdrawn their action against me, no further need to
| progress, cancelled
|
| I called the court to find out WTF
|
| They had, and do every week, mass spammed the court with hundreds
| of parking cases, knowing that pretty much everyone would act
| like my wife pay a couple of hundred quid not to risk their
| credit record. I mean a county court judgement and you can kiss a
| mortgage goodbye.
|
| That is simple abuse - an overworked courts system, hundreds
| probably thousands of rubbish claims that are put simply to
| strong arm people to pay up with legal threats, and no genuine
| attempt to filter out cases with merit, or even only look at
| "repeat offenders"
|
| But is it worth the time of any parliamentarian to take this on
| (well frankly yes it would be great backbencher cause celeb, but
| what do I know.
|
| Anyhow there was a point here - there are many many legitimate
| companies whose ficking business model is based on legal strong
| arming anyone who makes a minor infraction and that's ok, but
| having a scam my business model to fight the scammy business
| model is bad?
|
| Yes DoNotPay could have stayed on the right side of the line -
| but then would frankly run out of money. I guess we can only put
| our Hope in the hands of our elected representatives:-)
| balls187 wrote:
| In the US, parking and private parking lots are easily one of
| the scammiest businesses.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| I think _DoNotPay and find out_ is the vision of this company.
| system2 wrote:
| I am stopping myself from releasing shitty chatgpt wrappers which
| I see at every trade expo. I am just not doing it because I don't
| want to add more shit to the shitshow.
| dcchambers wrote:
| > initially was advertised as "the world's first robot lawyer"
| with the ability to "sue anyone with the click of a button."
|
| There is no world in which allowing that to happen is a good
| idea.
| praveen9920 wrote:
| I understand the sentiment but to be fair this is currently
| happening everywhere but only the rich people have access as
| they are the only one who have lawyers on retainer.
|
| Access to legal services to poor will change things. In short
| term, judicial system will be overwhelmed and are forced to
| adopt new and efficient procedures.
| rideontime wrote:
| About time. I've been waiting on this one for a couple years now.
| Crackula wrote:
| 1. Amusing title 2. Yea it sounds like a smug and shitty company
| But 3. If I get some parking ticket or some small wrong doing I
| am totally going to consult with GPT before I go ahead and hire a
| lawyer. A well trained AI could definitely do the work of most
| lawyers better than they could. Lawyers and judges usually just
| recite rules, previous cases and known loopholes. They are a
| human search engine and they cost quite a bit.
| tonygiorgio wrote:
| There's a lot of hate for the AI marketing aspects, and that AI
| isn't up to par for full lawyer replacements, but they've been
| around with a very working and usable app before way before the
| AI hype.
|
| Lawyers at huge firms or companies automate the hell out of their
| legal actions against normal citizens and get things wrong all
| the time. But it's okay if they do it because they're part of the
| same cabal keeping the legal system afloat. Say what you want
| negatively about some dark patterns and marketing BS, they're
| making legal things affordable to the every day person.
|
| The fine seems fair for overhyped marketing claims, but I hope
| they keep going and improving.
| op00to wrote:
| I prefer to tout the unfrozen caveman lawyer.
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