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.
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?
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.
I don't think anyone would argue that lawyers shouldn't get paid for their time, but in many cases their rates are excessive. When people's rights and freedom are at risk the cost should never be a barrier that most people can't afford to clear.
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.
> 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 mechanism against public understanding, because the public wouldn't support many things in the status quo if they understood the workings of them, and the people who do understand the workings but prefer the status quo use this to their advantage.
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 complicated.
> 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.
"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 becomes enraged without any real understanding of complexities and trade-offs of the system, as well as unintended consequences of proposed "fixes". It is the main reason why socialism is a thing.
> "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.
There are a lot of cases (to the point where I expect your average person sees dozens of them every day) where the media isn't just "over-simplifying"; they're presenting things that are specifically crafted to both
- Be factually correct
- Make the reader leave with an false understanding of the situation
This exact same thing happens with political campaigns.
Over-simplifications are false. They don't even meet the bar of being factually correct, whether because the proponent is willfully leaving something out or because they're ignorant themselves. It's not impossible for it to happen innocently, because people selling simplistic narratives often build a following even when they're true believers.
The thing you're talking about is selection bias. It's the thing assholes do when they want to lie to people but don't want to get sued for defamation. Whenever you discover someone using this modus operandi, delete them from your feed.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
Natural selection results in species succeeding that do some pretty brutal things. Natural selection also applies to religions, governments, and startups.
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"!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
But then you have to make a different statement. The purpose of a large, publicly traded for-profit corporation is to maximize profit.
This is quite an important distinction because it implies we may want to limit the prevalence of those things and increase the prevalence of small businesses and privately-held medium businesses that can advance other societal goals.
It is not clear to me that large and/or publicly traded corporations must maximize short-term profit. The seminal case of shareholders vs management concerning the Ford Motor Company in its early days shows that the objectives and incentives are not beyond debate and thus not intrinsically tied to the size or ownership model of a company.
The government has consolidated around the current set of incentives, both directly through its own arms and indirectly through legislation and policy, leading to the result we see today. Breaking these large businesses up may lead to some disruption for awhile, but if the incentives stay the same, the same end result will likely be arrived at again before too long.
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.
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.
"they" seems to be referring to DoNotPay, the subject of this discussion.
"mad libs" is a game where you have a set of text with a bunch of blank spaces and then the group fills them in with words to come up with a funny end result.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
"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).
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.
> 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.
And that's why you're not a criminal. This is a criminal act and approved and implemented by criminals. Main thing is in the US it usually pays to do white collar crime as long as it's not too big or too embarassing to politicians.
> 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.
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!
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).
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?
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
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
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
>$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).
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.
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.
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."
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.)
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.
I agree that would be a valuable proposition were it to be true (no idea, IANALE). But what I found impressive was the claim that said "robot" could do it even more similar to a human's work than a human lawyer could!
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.
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.
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.
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.
'''"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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:-)
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.
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?
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.
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].
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
>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?
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.
I don't think anyone would argue that lawyers shouldn't get paid for their time, but in many cases their rates are excessive. When people's rights and freedom are at risk the cost should never be a barrier that most people can't afford to clear.
Too bad that the legal system is made of lawyers, whose interests run directly contrary to that ideal.
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.
> 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 mechanism against public understanding, because the public wouldn't support many things in the status quo if they understood the workings of them, and the people who do understand the workings but prefer the status quo use this to their advantage.
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 complicated.
> 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.
"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 becomes enraged without any real understanding of complexities and trade-offs of the system, as well as unintended consequences of proposed "fixes". It is the main reason why socialism is a thing.
> "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.
> The media over-simplifies things.
There are a lot of cases (to the point where I expect your average person sees dozens of them every day) where the media isn't just "over-simplifying"; they're presenting things that are specifically crafted to both
- Be factually correct
- Make the reader leave with an false understanding of the situation
This exact same thing happens with political campaigns.
Oh of course, but that's a different thing.
Over-simplifications are false. They don't even meet the bar of being factually correct, whether because the proponent is willfully leaving something out or because they're ignorant themselves. It's not impossible for it to happen innocently, because people selling simplistic narratives often build a following even when they're true believers.
The thing you're talking about is selection bias. It's the thing assholes do when they want to lie to people but don't want to get sued for defamation. Whenever you discover someone using this modus operandi, delete them from your feed.
> 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.
> 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.
Reminds me of the expression "in and of itself".
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.
Nothing about that sounds byzantine nor prohibitively expensive. Heck, you were provided an attorney for free.
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.
>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
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.
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
> 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.
Human lifespan is too short
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)
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.
I was more thinking (but didn't express) human history, not "do's and don'ts" but "this happened, draw your own conclusions".
you've just described public school
> 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.
Natural selection results in species succeeding that do some pretty brutal things. Natural selection also applies to religions, governments, and startups.
when the government regulates it. until then it will continue to the end of time.
There are already laws for false advertising.
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"!
Humanity isn't ready for communism yet :(
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
But then you have to make a different statement. The purpose of a large, publicly traded for-profit corporation is to maximize profit.
This is quite an important distinction because it implies we may want to limit the prevalence of those things and increase the prevalence of small businesses and privately-held medium businesses that can advance other societal goals.
It is not clear to me that large and/or publicly traded corporations must maximize short-term profit. The seminal case of shareholders vs management concerning the Ford Motor Company in its early days shows that the objectives and incentives are not beyond debate and thus not intrinsically tied to the size or ownership model of a company.
The government has consolidated around the current set of incentives, both directly through its own arms and indirectly through legislation and policy, leading to the result we see today. Breaking these large businesses up may lead to some disruption for awhile, but if the incentives stay the same, the same end result will likely be arrived at again before too long.
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.
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.
> Before ChatGPT they were basically mad libs for finding and filling out the right form
Who is they? And why did you make this a left/right issue?
"they" seems to be referring to DoNotPay, the subject of this discussion.
"mad libs" is a game where you have a set of text with a bunch of blank spaces and then the group fills them in with words to come up with a funny end result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Libs
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ship is sinking, and we're swimming towards the iceberg.
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."
>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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
haha touche. That's a fair thing to say
I hold the FTC in higher regard than I do your personal experience when it comes to this matter.
You seem to continue to be deceived as you continue to describe the service as if it is a lawyer
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
"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).
>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.
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.
> it used to be pretty positively received on HN
HN is a fickle beast
On a long enough timeline we all (with the exception of narcissists) see our younger selves as little idiots.
> 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.
You might be retiring in jail, though.
Unfortunately, "if it's an app, it's legal".
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Donotpay should have used donotpay to fight FTC ruling back. That would have been the ultimate outcome if they would have won.
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.
> 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.
And that's why you're not a criminal. This is a criminal act and approved and implemented by criminals. Main thing is in the US it usually pays to do white collar crime as long as it's not too big or too embarassing to politicians.
> 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.
Is "brave" a euphemism for stupid.
I heard it's the British way of saying "that's insane".
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574974/etymology...
I can think of very few situations where someone would say "wow that's brave" and not mean "wow you're an idiot"
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To prove that that DoNotPay does not work, they will use DoNotPay on themselves to defend against this case.
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.
>I'm not sure they mean "LLM based AI"
The article states that they use ChatGPT.
Crazy people take any advice from people without citing the exact legal clause.
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!
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.
>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.
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).
>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.
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?
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
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
Wow buddy. I guess we could say the dollar amount you were willing to forego is the price of your sense of superiority.
Haha, yeah, feeling very superior over here with my... not lying to my customers. Yep!
What is morally or ethically wrong with what they did?
Maybe it's morally or ethically wrong to prosecute them and take their belongings?
I consider boldly lying about the efficacy of your product in your advertisements to be unethical.
You don't, I guess. That's fine.
Let's ask a chatbot and find out.
lmao at least the should have finetuned gpt4
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.
> 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?
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.
>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.
"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
>$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).
> DoNotPay accepted no liability.
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.
Fair points. I hadn't considered that a trial subscription is still a subscriber.
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'.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.)
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
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.
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".
And the other 4.99% they do that anyways, in my experience.
Tbf it's almost always applicable. Get more rest, drink more water, exercise and have a better diet, is universally good advice.
I agree that would be a valuable proposition were it to be true (no idea, IANALE). But what I found impressive was the claim that said "robot" could do it even more similar to a human's work than a human lawyer could!
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.
Ironic given the app’s purpose.
Official release: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/...
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.
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.
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.
'''"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.
> 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.
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.
DoNoPay has to pay a fine is just an irony.
Could they...employ their own services?
Haha, my thoughts precisely. The first 4 words of the title were bewildering for me for a few seconds.
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!
Lawyer Kathryn Tewson on Twitter has been calling them out for a long time https://x.com/kathryntewson/status/1838995653630083086?s=46
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think you'll find elevator attendance errors rather cheaper.
Typical lawyer mistake versus an elevator mistake? Depends on the nature of each mistake. Elevator accidents can be serious.
We're talking about the guy that presses the buttons for the people taking the elevator, yes? What serious elevator accident might arise from that?
Talking about that guy, or the lack of that guy, historically in elevators of various vintages.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elevator_accidents
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.
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.
In 2021 a literal discord group raised several million dollars so take that into consideration.
I think DoNotPay and find out is the vision of this company.
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.
Has the chance to make their best marketing material yet.
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.
Funny thing is, they're probably still ahead financially vs if they actually hired lawyers to do this on the up-and-up.
Good, AI shouldn't be anywhere near anything where accountability matters...
About time. I've been waiting on this one for a couple years now.
Maybe they can use their own AI to get out of paying it?
If you mess with the bull, you get the horns!
I prefer to tout the unfrozen caveman lawyer.
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:-)
In the US, parking and private parking lots are easily one of the scammiest businesses.
My bet is they won’t pay.
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.
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...)
Link to related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41638199
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?
oh the irony
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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.
> 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-...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
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.
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.
>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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.