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Pretty sure the whole reason why DoNotPay actually exists is because defending against parking tickets didn't actually require a strong defense. The tickets wer

by jchw 4y ago

Pretty sure the whole reason why DoNotPay actually exists is because defending against parking tickets didn't actually require a strong defense. The tickets were flawed automation, and their formulaic nature justified and equally formulaic response, or something to that effect. Whether the LLM was actually going to output answers directly, or just be used to drive a behavior tree or something like that, is a question I don't see answered anywhere. That said, if it's such a catastrophically stupid idea, I'm not really sure why it had to be shot down so harshly: seems like that problem would elegantly solve itself. I assume the real reason it was shot down was out of fear that it would work well. Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response?

dragonwriter 4y ago
> That said, if it's such a catastrophically stupid idea, I'm not really sure why it had to be shot down so harshly To avoid the catastrophy that makes it a catastrophically bad idea. > I assume the real reason it was shot down was out of fear that it would work well. Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response? It had already worked badly (subpoenaeing the key adverse witness, who would provide a basically automatic defense win, and one of the most common wins for this kind of case, if they failed to show up.)
- rafaelero 4y ago
  A traffic ticket is hardly a catastrophy.
WinstonSmith84 4y ago
This is the obvious point: they fear it would work well and they will have to slowly say good bye to their extremely well paid profession. We are so close from a new disruptive revolution where a lot of jobs (not just lawyers) will be made obsolete. Possibly similar to inventions like assembly lines, or cars. Such an exciting time to be alive!
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
>That said, if it's such a catastrophically stupid idea, I'm not really sure why it had to be shot down so harshly The title of the article seems misleading. A techbro who doesn't appear to be a lawyer or has any understanding of the law wants to use AI so people can defend themselves. It doesn't seem like any of this was done with input from any bar associations. Without seeing the emails and "threats", and ignoring the emotional language it sounds like these people were helping him out: >"In particular, Browder said one state bar official noted that the unauthorized practice of law is a misdemeanor in some states punishable up to six months in county jail." Were these emails "angry" or just stating very plainly and with forceful language, that if you do this without the AI having the appropriate qualifications, you are most probably going to jail? It even sounds like Browder didn't really widely publicise the fact that a case defended by an AI was about to happen. >As word got out, an uneasy buzz began to swirl among various state bar officials, according to Browder. He says angry letters began to pour in. Really sounds like these letter writers did him a favour.
jacobsenscott 4y ago
DoNotPay exists because AI vaporware is the new crypto vaporware, which was the new IoT vaporware, which was the new Web2 vaporware, and so on. Build a "product" on AI and you get (in this case) $28 million in funding. Pull stunts like this to generate a little buzz for the next round of funding. Then bail out with your golden parachute. Now you have experience founding a startup - do it again for $50 million.
Lazare 4y ago
I think the reaction was driven by four things: 1) The legal profession tries to instill a sense of ethics into the lawyers they train, and what DoNotPay was proposing violated that ethics. I don't want to overyhype the legal profession, but many (maybe even most) lawyers really do want to do the right thing, which by their lights means clients get the best representation possible. Which an LLM currently is not, so you get a visceral reaction from people at what they see as discussion of/advocacy of unethical conduct. 2) As a practical matter, it was likely to yield very bad outcomes for all concerned, including professional and legal consequences. Bluntly, DoNotPay was proposing to do something illegal, it really could have resulted in jail time, and possible disbarrment for any lawyers who were involved. For good or ill, judges have immense power to control what goes on in their courtrooms, and the risk of a judge taking offense to this is high. And the higher profile the case (and DoNotPay was offering $1m for a lawyer who would repeat whatever the chatbot said in a Supreme Court case) the higher the stakes. That really could be a career ending mistake for a junior lawyer (plus, almost by definition, anything that reaches the Supreme Court is important; bad representation could throw the result, with potentially terrible consequences for the country). 3) This is not, by any means, the first attempt to try and automate or streamline the provision of basic legal services. And it's a field ripe for such things; simple stuff like many rental agreements, employment contracts, sueing in small claims court, divorce agreements, etc., etc. all seem like they should be able to be generated by filling out a form and pressing a button, not hiring a high priced professional to craft a bespoke document. But over and over, such attempts have failed badly, and lawyers are getting reflexively defensive to anything that looks like that, not because they threaten their jobs, but because they keep being so terrible. 4) And DoNotPay looks a lot like these previous failures. See, eg, https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-lawyer-isnt-a-lawyer-and-im-not-sure-its-even-a-robot/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-l... which makes them look less like some cutting edge AI lawyer that will put an army of paralegals out of work, and more like yet another shitty site trying to resell Mechanical Turk at an enormous markup. Now, maybe what they're showing to the public is entirely different than what they want to use in courtrooms, but...it doesn't build confidence. In many ways I think this is analagous to self driving cars. There is scope for enormous gains here, it's probably inevitable eventually, and it will probably put a lot of delivery drivers, taxi drivers, and truck drivers out of a job when it finally arrives. But right now deciding to hook your new self driving AI up to an unmarked truck and do a secret test in an unnamed US city without warning anyone or getting any licenses or permits is unethical and illegal, and you'd expect a very negative reaction if you announce your plans on Twitter. Especially if your website offers some software that they claim can control an RC car, but when you try it, it keeps steering into walls. > I assume the real reason it was shot down was out of fear that it would work well The next lawyer (or AI expert!) I see who thinks it would work well will be the first. There's just an enormous mismatch between the requirements, what chatbots in general seem to be capable of right now, and what DoNotPay in specific seems to be capable of. (Again, see the the Tech Dirt link.) And again, note that while there's a pretty strong argument that it should be faster, easier, and cheaper to create a rental agreement (or whatever), DoNotPay was making a big deal out of how they wanted to argue in front of the Supreme Court. DoNotPay doesn't seem like they're going to nail the "draft a rental agreement for cheap" any time soon, but maybe they (or someone else) can. But handing a Supreme Court case? Obviously not. Now you might argue (and one certainly hopes!) the whole Supreme Court thing was just an unserious PR stunt, but when a company is making undifferentiated claims that their tech can do something semi-plausible and something entirely impossible, it makes the entire thing look like a scam created by or aimed at people who just don't know any better. Not a good look! In short: I think the negative reaction is very, very understandable.
kadoban 4y ago
> Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response? It doesn't really matter if it'd work well or poorly. Lawyers don't want to be replaced, and being a lawyer entails a great ability to be annoying to delay/prevent things you don't want to happen.
fatbird 4y ago
It had to be shot down harshly because there are some premises to a courtroom proceeding that aren't met by an AI as we currently have. One of those is that the lawyer arguing a case is properly credentialed and has been admitted to the bar, and is a professional subject to malpractice standards, who can be held responsible for their performance. An AI spitting out statistically likely responses can't be considered an actual party to the proceedings in that sense. If a lawyer cites a non-existent precedent, they can make their apologies to the court or be sanctioned. If the AI cites a non-existent precedent, there's literally no way to incorporate that error back into the AI because there's no factual underlying model against which to check the AI's output--unless you had an actual lawyer checking it, in which case, what's the point of the AI? Someone standing in court, repeating what they hear through an earpiece, is literally committing a fraud on the court by presenting themselves as a credentialled attorney. The stunt of "haha, it was really just chatGPT!" would have had severe legal consequences for everyone involved. The harsh response saved DoNotPay from itself.
- john_the_writer 4y ago
  I don't understand the "cites a non-existent precedent" bit. Presumably the AI would have a database of a pile of precedent. It wouldn't make up cites. It would have "knowledge" of so much precedence, it could likely find something to win either side of the argument.
  - fatbird 4y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding how the model works. It predicts next tokens based on past tokens and the LLM trained on large bodies of text. It doesn't have an underlying database of "factual" elements it incorporates or searches, and its output doesn't have an underlying semantic structure that can be verified or reasoned about. The entirety of the quality of its output can only be judged by whether it "sounds" like the rest of the text on which it was trained. I think making the connection between the predictive output and an underlying representation of reality is the next great step, but until that happens, chatGPT's output is just amazing mimicry of human language.
- 4y ago
bavila 4y ago
> Pretty sure the whole reason why DoNotPay actually exists is because defending against parking tickets didn't actually require a strong defense. The tickets were flawed automation... I have some past experience working in the courts in my state, and I know there are many judges who are perfectly fine with dismissing minor traffic infractions for no reason other than that they feel like it. If you've got an otherwise clean traffic abstract and sent in a reasonable sounding letter contesting the infraction, these judges probably aren't going to thoroughly read through every word of it and contrast it with what was alleged in the citation. They don't really care about the city making an extra $173 off your parking ticket -- they just want to get through their citation reviews before lunch. Case dismissed. So I am not surprised at all by the success of DoNotPay for minor traffic infractions. Most traffic courts are heavily strained by heavy case loads. If you give them a reason to throw your case out so they can go home on time, by all means, they will take it.
- lolinder 4y ago
  And I don't think anyone here has an issue with DoNotPay providing pre-trial advice and tips for someone defending themselves. It's bringing that into the courtroom that crosses a line from defending yourself to hiring an AI lawyer, and that line is where I'm very uncomfortable.
danShumway 4y ago
> Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response? I can't speak for lawyers in general or what everyone's motivations would be, but my initial reaction was that it seemed like a somewhat unethical experiment. I assume the client would have agreed or represented themselves, but even there -- legal advice is tricky because it's advice -- it feels unethical to tell a person to rely on something that is very likely going to give them sub-par legal representation. Sneaking it into a courtroom without the judge's knowledge feels a lot like a PR stunt, and one that might encourage further legal malpractice in the future. I assume there are other factors at play, I assume many lawyers felt insulted or threatened, but ignoring that, it's not an experiment I personally would have lauded even as a non-lawyer who wishes the legal industry was, well... less of an industry. The goal of automating parts of the legal industry and improving access to representation is a good goal that I agree with. And maybe there are ways where AI can help with that, sure. I'm optimistic, I guess. But this feels to me like a startup company taking advantage of someone who's in legal trouble for a publicity stunt, not like an ethically run experiment with controls and with efforts made to mitigate harm. Details have been scarce, so maybe there were other safety measures put in place; I could be wrong. But my understanding was that this was planned to be secret representation where the judge didn't know. And I can't think of any faster way to get into trouble with a judge then pulling something like that. Even if the AI was brilliant, it apparently wasn't brilliant enough to counsel its own developers that running experiments on judges is a bad legal strategy.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  When you're poor you have the choice between an AI that may work or you'll be defending yourself. Access to legal assistance is almost as unobtainable as a dentist these days.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    > When you're poor you have the choice between an AI that may work or you'll be defending yourself. This is a thing that lots of people say about unethical businesses, and I'm a little skeptical about it at this point. A couple of objections I have: - You have a constitutional right to legal representation when accused of a crime by the US government, and while we don't to abandon people who are suffering now because of some theoretical future fix, we also don't want to normalize the idea that constitutional rights only exist when a private market accommodates them. That's explicitly a bad direction for the country to go. - Saying "well, this works here and now, and people don't have access to anything better" is in my mind only a really effective argument when we know that the thing here and now actually works. But we don't know that this works, which changes a lot about the equation. - Is sneaking an AI into a courtroom through an earpiece really a cost-effective accessible strategy for poor people? Nothing about this screams "accessibility" to me. I think summing up the last two points, if the AI was proven to actually work in a court of law, and was an accessible option, then sure, at that point I think the argument would have a lot more weight. It wouldn't be ideal, it would be a bad state for us to be in because your constitutional rights should not depend on an AI. But I could see a strong argument for using the AI in the meantime. But that doesn't mean that DoNotPay should do unethical things right now to get to that point. The way that your choice is being phrased is begging the question: it assumes that the AI is the only choice other than no representation, that it does work, and that it will produce better outcomes. But we don't actually know if the AI does work in a court of law, and DoNotPay's decision was to "move fast and break things"; it was to start releasing it into the wild without knowing what would happen. We don't know if asking people to represent themselves with a secret earpiece is a good legal strategy or if it's accessible. We don't know what happens when something goes wrong. We don't know that this actually is a working solution. But they were putting someone's legal outcome on the line anyway. I think there's a big difference between making an imperfect solution available to poor people because we don't have anything better to offer, and using poor people as experimental fodder to build an imperfect solution that might not work at all. There's a lot of assumption here that using their AI would be better than representing yourself, and I don't know that's true. A judge is not going to pleased with being used as an experiment. And I've been hearing people say that the AI subpoenaed the officer involved in the ticket? That's not a good legal strategy. The proper way to build a solution like this is to make sure it works before you start using it on people, and I think it's unethical to give someone bad legal advice and to try and justify it because giving that person bad legal advice might allow the company to help other people down the line. A lot of our laws around legal representation are predicated on the idea that legal advice should be solely focused on the good of the client, and not focused on the lawyer's career, or on someone else the lawyer wants to help, or on what the lawyer will be able to do in the future. Based on what we know about the state of the AI today, it doesn't seem like DoNotPay was thinking solely about the good of the person they were advising. We really don't want the legal industry to be an industry that embraces "the ends justify the means."
ufmace 4y ago
Thinking about how the problem would "elegantly solve itself" seems to illustrate the issue. Someone using it in an actual courtroom would make a boneheadedly dumb argument or refer to a nonexistent precedent or something. Then maybe the judge gets upset and gives them the harshest punishment or contempt of court or they just lose the case. They may or may not ever get a chance to fix it. A failure mode of jail time and/or massive fines for your customers doesn't sound all that elegant to me. This isn't a thing to show people cat pictures, I don't think move fast and break things is a good strategy. Not to say that there aren't some entrenched possibly corrupt and self-serving interests here. But that doesn't mean they don't have a point.
- treis 4y ago
  It's probably better than the existing alternative. Which is roughly plead guilty because you don't have money to pay a lawyer. Or don't sue someone because you don't have money to pay a lawyer.
- thinking4real 4y ago
  “Then maybe the judge gets upset and gives them the harshest punishment or contempt of court” That sounds like a horrible judge, maybe this AI can be used to sniff them out and get rid of them.
  - underbluewaters 4y ago
    Judges would be absolutely right to punish lawyers or defendants that are bullshitting the court. They are wasting time and resources that would otherwise go towards cases where people are actually representing themselves in good faith.
    - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
      And yet that never seems to happen when another Hollywood couple shows up. How much time and money was wasted on Johnny Depp?
marmetio 4y ago
The specific scenario doesn't matter. It's illegal to represent someone else in court if you're not a lawyer. There are a lot of things that you can't get a second chance at if your lawyer messes up that suing them can't fix. Lawyers and judges also negotiate, which a machine can't do because nobody feels an obligation to cut them some slack. Also now you're tainting case law with machine-generated garbage. Everything about the justice system assumes humans in the loop. You can't bolt on this one thing without denying people justice.
- john_the_writer 4y ago
  The tricky bit about your comment. "If you're not a lawyer." In this case who's the "You're".
  - marmetio 4y ago
    Not tricky at all. If someone is receiving counsel, then someone is giving counsel. Hiding behind a machine adds a pretty minor extra step to identifying the culprits, but does not create ambiguity over whether they are culpable. On the other hand, here's a lawyer who thinks it would not count as legal representation, but hasn't seen the arguments made against it yet. Food for thought. https://youtu.be/r-gvArVKfUM https://youtu.be/r-gvArVKfUM
- cwkoss 4y ago
  If you can sell a book that helps teach someone how to represent themselves, why can't you sell a person access to a robot that helps teach them how to represent themselves? Why is the robot not "speech"?
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    A book gives legal information, not specific to a certain circumstance or case. If your chatbot is considering the specifics of a case before advising on a course of action, it's probably giving legal advice.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
g_p 4y ago
Browder (founder) appeared to also acknowledge that it was not fit for purpose as well [0]. If something that's providing input to a formal legal process (which, let's not forget, means false or inaccurate statements have real and potentially prejudicial repercussions), "makes facts up and exaggerates", then there seems to be no reason they should be talking about taking this anywhere near a courthouse. This feels a lot like "move fast and break things" being applied - where the people silly enough to use this tool and say whatever it came up with would end up with more serious legal issues. It seems like that only stopped when the founder himself was the one facing the serious legal issues - 'good enough for thee, but not for me'... I think what many are overlooking is that bad inputs to the legal system can jeopardise someone's position in future irretrievably, with little or no recourse (due to his class action/arbitration waiver). Once someone starts down the road of legal action, there's real consequences if you get it wrong - not only through exposure, but also through prejudicing your own position and making it impossible to take a different route, having previously argued something. [0] https://twitter.com/SemaforComms/status/1618306993902743555 https://twitter.com/SemaforComms/status/1618306993902743555
abfan1127 4y ago
Protectionism. Its why they shout for regulation. Keep the others out, force consumers to use your product, make lots of money.

by jchw 4y ago

dragonwriter 4y ago

> That said, if it's such a catastrophically stupid idea, I'm not really sure why it had to be shot down so harshly To avoid the catastrophy that makes it a catastrophically bad idea. > I assume the real reason it was shot down was out of fear that it would work well. Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response? It had already worked badly (subpoenaeing the key adverse witness, who would provide a basically automatic defense win, and one of the most common wins for this kind of case, if they failed to show up.)

rafaelero 4y ago
A traffic ticket is hardly a catastrophy.

WinstonSmith84 4y ago

This is the obvious point: they fear it would work well and they will have to slowly say good bye to their extremely well paid profession. We are so close from a new disruptive revolution where a lot of jobs (not just lawyers) will be made obsolete. Possibly similar to inventions like assembly lines, or cars. Such an exciting time to be alive!

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago

>That said, if it's such a catastrophically stupid idea, I'm not really sure why it had to be shot down so harshly The title of the article seems misleading. A techbro who doesn't appear to be a lawyer or has any understanding of the law wants to use AI so people can defend themselves. It doesn't seem like any of this was done with input from any bar associations. Without seeing the emails and "threats", and ignoring the emotional language it sounds like these people were helping him out: >"In particular, Browder said one state bar official noted that the unauthorized practice of law is a misdemeanor in some states punishable up to six months in county jail." Were these emails "angry" or just stating very plainly and with forceful language, that if you do this without the AI having the appropriate qualifications, you are most probably going to jail? It even sounds like Browder didn't really widely publicise the fact that a case defended by an AI was about to happen. >As word got out, an uneasy buzz began to swirl among various state bar officials, according to Browder. He says angry letters began to pour in. Really sounds like these letter writers did him a favour.

jacobsenscott 4y ago

DoNotPay exists because AI vaporware is the new crypto vaporware, which was the new IoT vaporware, which was the new Web2 vaporware, and so on. Build a "product" on AI and you get (in this case) $28 million in funding. Pull stunts like this to generate a little buzz for the next round of funding. Then bail out with your golden parachute. Now you have experience founding a startup - do it again for $50 million.

Lazare 4y ago

I think the reaction was driven by four things: 1) The legal profession tries to instill a sense of ethics into the lawyers they train, and what DoNotPay was proposing violated that ethics. I don't want to overyhype the legal profession, but many (maybe even most) lawyers really do want to do the right thing, which by their lights means clients get the best representation possible. Which an LLM currently is not, so you get a visceral reaction from people at what they see as discussion of/advocacy of unethical conduct. 2) As a practical matter, it was likely to yield very bad outcomes for all concerned, including professional and legal consequences. Bluntly, DoNotPay was proposing to do something illegal, it really could have resulted in jail time, and possible disbarrment for any lawyers who were involved. For good or ill, judges have immense power to control what goes on in their courtrooms, and the risk of a judge taking offense to this is high. And the higher profile the case (and DoNotPay was offering $1m for a lawyer who would repeat whatever the chatbot said in a Supreme Court case) the higher the stakes. That really could be a career ending mistake for a junior lawyer (plus, almost by definition, anything that reaches the Supreme Court is important; bad representation could throw the result, with potentially terrible consequences for the country). 3) This is not, by any means, the first attempt to try and automate or streamline the provision of basic legal services. And it's a field ripe for such things; simple stuff like many rental agreements, employment contracts, sueing in small claims court, divorce agreements, etc., etc. all seem like they should be able to be generated by filling out a form and pressing a button, not hiring a high priced professional to craft a bespoke document. But over and over, such attempts have failed badly, and lawyers are getting reflexively defensive to anything that looks like that, not because they threaten their jobs, but because they keep being so terrible. 4) And DoNotPay looks a lot like these previous failures. See, eg, https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-lawyer-isnt-a-lawyer-and-im-not-sure-its-even-a-robot/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-l... which makes them look less like some cutting edge AI lawyer that will put an army of paralegals out of work, and more like yet another shitty site trying to resell Mechanical Turk at an enormous markup. Now, maybe what they're showing to the public is entirely different than what they want to use in courtrooms, but...it doesn't build confidence. In many ways I think this is analagous to self driving cars. There is scope for enormous gains here, it's probably inevitable eventually, and it will probably put a lot of delivery drivers, taxi drivers, and truck drivers out of a job when it finally arrives. But right now deciding to hook your new self driving AI up to an unmarked truck and do a secret test in an unnamed US city without warning anyone or getting any licenses or permits is unethical and illegal, and you'd expect a very negative reaction if you announce your plans on Twitter. Especially if your website offers some software that they claim can control an RC car, but when you try it, it keeps steering into walls. > I assume the real reason it was shot down was out of fear that it would work well The next lawyer (or AI expert!) I see who thinks it would work well will be the first. There's just an enormous mismatch between the requirements, what chatbots in general seem to be capable of right now, and what DoNotPay in specific seems to be capable of. (Again, see the the Tech Dirt link.) And again, note that while there's a pretty strong argument that it should be faster, easier, and cheaper to create a rental agreement (or whatever), DoNotPay was making a big deal out of how they wanted to argue in front of the Supreme Court. DoNotPay doesn't seem like they're going to nail the "draft a rental agreement for cheap" any time soon, but maybe they (or someone else) can. But handing a Supreme Court case? Obviously not. Now you might argue (and one certainly hopes!) the whole Supreme Court thing was just an unserious PR stunt, but when a company is making undifferentiated claims that their tech can do something semi-plausible and something entirely impossible, it makes the entire thing look like a scam created by or aimed at people who just don't know any better. Not a good look! In short: I think the negative reaction is very, very understandable.

kadoban 4y ago

> Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response? It doesn't really matter if it'd work well or poorly. Lawyers don't want to be replaced, and being a lawyer entails a great ability to be annoying to delay/prevent things you don't want to happen.

fatbird 4y ago

It had to be shot down harshly because there are some premises to a courtroom proceeding that aren't met by an AI as we currently have. One of those is that the lawyer arguing a case is properly credentialed and has been admitted to the bar, and is a professional subject to malpractice standards, who can be held responsible for their performance. An AI spitting out statistically likely responses can't be considered an actual party to the proceedings in that sense. If a lawyer cites a non-existent precedent, they can make their apologies to the court or be sanctioned. If the AI cites a non-existent precedent, there's literally no way to incorporate that error back into the AI because there's no factual underlying model against which to check the AI's output--unless you had an actual lawyer checking it, in which case, what's the point of the AI? Someone standing in court, repeating what they hear through an earpiece, is literally committing a fraud on the court by presenting themselves as a credentialled attorney. The stunt of "haha, it was really just chatGPT!" would have had severe legal consequences for everyone involved. The harsh response saved DoNotPay from itself.

john_the_writer 4y ago
I don't understand the "cites a non-existent precedent" bit. Presumably the AI would have a database of a pile of precedent. It wouldn't make up cites. It would have "knowledge" of so much precedence, it could likely find something to win either side of the argument.
- fatbird 4y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding how the model works. It predicts next tokens based on past tokens and the LLM trained on large bodies of text. It doesn't have an underlying database of "factual" elements it incorporates or searches, and its output doesn't have an underlying semantic structure that can be verified or reasoned about. The entirety of the quality of its output can only be judged by whether it "sounds" like the rest of the text on which it was trained. I think making the connection between the predictive output and an underlying representation of reality is the next great step, but until that happens, chatGPT's output is just amazing mimicry of human language.
4y ago

bavila 4y ago

> Pretty sure the whole reason why DoNotPay actually exists is because defending against parking tickets didn't actually require a strong defense. The tickets were flawed automation... I have some past experience working in the courts in my state, and I know there are many judges who are perfectly fine with dismissing minor traffic infractions for no reason other than that they feel like it. If you've got an otherwise clean traffic abstract and sent in a reasonable sounding letter contesting the infraction, these judges probably aren't going to thoroughly read through every word of it and contrast it with what was alleged in the citation. They don't really care about the city making an extra $173 off your parking ticket -- they just want to get through their citation reviews before lunch. Case dismissed. So I am not surprised at all by the success of DoNotPay for minor traffic infractions. Most traffic courts are heavily strained by heavy case loads. If you give them a reason to throw your case out so they can go home on time, by all means, they will take it.

lolinder 4y ago
And I don't think anyone here has an issue with DoNotPay providing pre-trial advice and tips for someone defending themselves. It's bringing that into the courtroom that crosses a line from defending yourself to hiring an AI lawyer, and that line is where I'm very uncomfortable.

danShumway 4y ago

> Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response? I can't speak for lawyers in general or what everyone's motivations would be, but my initial reaction was that it seemed like a somewhat unethical experiment. I assume the client would have agreed or represented themselves, but even there -- legal advice is tricky because it's advice -- it feels unethical to tell a person to rely on something that is very likely going to give them sub-par legal representation. Sneaking it into a courtroom without the judge's knowledge feels a lot like a PR stunt, and one that might encourage further legal malpractice in the future. I assume there are other factors at play, I assume many lawyers felt insulted or threatened, but ignoring that, it's not an experiment I personally would have lauded even as a non-lawyer who wishes the legal industry was, well... less of an industry. The goal of automating parts of the legal industry and improving access to representation is a good goal that I agree with. And maybe there are ways where AI can help with that, sure. I'm optimistic, I guess. But this feels to me like a startup company taking advantage of someone who's in legal trouble for a publicity stunt, not like an ethically run experiment with controls and with efforts made to mitigate harm. Details have been scarce, so maybe there were other safety measures put in place; I could be wrong. But my understanding was that this was planned to be secret representation where the judge didn't know. And I can't think of any faster way to get into trouble with a judge then pulling something like that. Even if the AI was brilliant, it apparently wasn't brilliant enough to counsel its own developers that running experiments on judges is a bad legal strategy.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
When you're poor you have the choice between an AI that may work or you'll be defending yourself. Access to legal assistance is almost as unobtainable as a dentist these days.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > When you're poor you have the choice between an AI that may work or you'll be defending yourself. This is a thing that lots of people say about unethical businesses, and I'm a little skeptical about it at this point. A couple of objections I have: - You have a constitutional right to legal representation when accused of a crime by the US government, and while we don't to abandon people who are suffering now because of some theoretical future fix, we also don't want to normalize the idea that constitutional rights only exist when a private market accommodates them. That's explicitly a bad direction for the country to go. - Saying "well, this works here and now, and people don't have access to anything better" is in my mind only a really effective argument when we know that the thing here and now actually works. But we don't know that this works, which changes a lot about the equation. - Is sneaking an AI into a courtroom through an earpiece really a cost-effective accessible strategy for poor people? Nothing about this screams "accessibility" to me. I think summing up the last two points, if the AI was proven to actually work in a court of law, and was an accessible option, then sure, at that point I think the argument would have a lot more weight. It wouldn't be ideal, it would be a bad state for us to be in because your constitutional rights should not depend on an AI. But I could see a strong argument for using the AI in the meantime. But that doesn't mean that DoNotPay should do unethical things right now to get to that point. The way that your choice is being phrased is begging the question: it assumes that the AI is the only choice other than no representation, that it does work, and that it will produce better outcomes. But we don't actually know if the AI does work in a court of law, and DoNotPay's decision was to "move fast and break things"; it was to start releasing it into the wild without knowing what would happen. We don't know if asking people to represent themselves with a secret earpiece is a good legal strategy or if it's accessible. We don't know what happens when something goes wrong. We don't know that this actually is a working solution. But they were putting someone's legal outcome on the line anyway. I think there's a big difference between making an imperfect solution available to poor people because we don't have anything better to offer, and using poor people as experimental fodder to build an imperfect solution that might not work at all. There's a lot of assumption here that using their AI would be better than representing yourself, and I don't know that's true. A judge is not going to pleased with being used as an experiment. And I've been hearing people say that the AI subpoenaed the officer involved in the ticket? That's not a good legal strategy. The proper way to build a solution like this is to make sure it works before you start using it on people, and I think it's unethical to give someone bad legal advice and to try and justify it because giving that person bad legal advice might allow the company to help other people down the line. A lot of our laws around legal representation are predicated on the idea that legal advice should be solely focused on the good of the client, and not focused on the lawyer's career, or on someone else the lawyer wants to help, or on what the lawyer will be able to do in the future. Based on what we know about the state of the AI today, it doesn't seem like DoNotPay was thinking solely about the good of the person they were advising. We really don't want the legal industry to be an industry that embraces "the ends justify the means."

ufmace 4y ago

Thinking about how the problem would "elegantly solve itself" seems to illustrate the issue. Someone using it in an actual courtroom would make a boneheadedly dumb argument or refer to a nonexistent precedent or something. Then maybe the judge gets upset and gives them the harshest punishment or contempt of court or they just lose the case. They may or may not ever get a chance to fix it. A failure mode of jail time and/or massive fines for your customers doesn't sound all that elegant to me. This isn't a thing to show people cat pictures, I don't think move fast and break things is a good strategy. Not to say that there aren't some entrenched possibly corrupt and self-serving interests here. But that doesn't mean they don't have a point.

treis 4y ago
It's probably better than the existing alternative. Which is roughly plead guilty because you don't have money to pay a lawyer. Or don't sue someone because you don't have money to pay a lawyer.
thinking4real 4y ago
“Then maybe the judge gets upset and gives them the harshest punishment or contempt of court” That sounds like a horrible judge, maybe this AI can be used to sniff them out and get rid of them.
- underbluewaters 4y ago
  Judges would be absolutely right to punish lawyers or defendants that are bullshitting the court. They are wasting time and resources that would otherwise go towards cases where people are actually representing themselves in good faith.
  - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
    And yet that never seems to happen when another Hollywood couple shows up. How much time and money was wasted on Johnny Depp?

marmetio 4y ago

The specific scenario doesn't matter. It's illegal to represent someone else in court if you're not a lawyer. There are a lot of things that you can't get a second chance at if your lawyer messes up that suing them can't fix. Lawyers and judges also negotiate, which a machine can't do because nobody feels an obligation to cut them some slack. Also now you're tainting case law with machine-generated garbage. Everything about the justice system assumes humans in the loop. You can't bolt on this one thing without denying people justice.

john_the_writer 4y ago
The tricky bit about your comment. "If you're not a lawyer." In this case who's the "You're".
- marmetio 4y ago
  Not tricky at all. If someone is receiving counsel, then someone is giving counsel. Hiding behind a machine adds a pretty minor extra step to identifying the culprits, but does not create ambiguity over whether they are culpable. On the other hand, here's a lawyer who thinks it would not count as legal representation, but hasn't seen the arguments made against it yet. Food for thought. https://youtu.be/r-gvArVKfUM https://youtu.be/r-gvArVKfUM
cwkoss 4y ago
If you can sell a book that helps teach someone how to represent themselves, why can't you sell a person access to a robot that helps teach them how to represent themselves? Why is the robot not "speech"?
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  A book gives legal information, not specific to a certain circumstance or case. If your chatbot is considering the specifics of a case before advising on a course of action, it's probably giving legal advice.
- yamtaddle 4y ago

g_p 4y ago

Browder (founder) appeared to also acknowledge that it was not fit for purpose as well [0]. If something that's providing input to a formal legal process (which, let's not forget, means false or inaccurate statements have real and potentially prejudicial repercussions), "makes facts up and exaggerates", then there seems to be no reason they should be talking about taking this anywhere near a courthouse. This feels a lot like "move fast and break things" being applied - where the people silly enough to use this tool and say whatever it came up with would end up with more serious legal issues. It seems like that only stopped when the founder himself was the one facing the serious legal issues - 'good enough for thee, but not for me'... I think what many are overlooking is that bad inputs to the legal system can jeopardise someone's position in future irretrievably, with little or no recourse (due to his class action/arbitration waiver). Once someone starts down the road of legal action, there's real consequences if you get it wrong - not only through exposure, but also through prejudicing your own position and making it impossible to take a different route, having previously argued something. [0] https://twitter.com/SemaforComms/status/1618306993902743555 https://twitter.com/SemaforComms/status/1618306993902743555

abfan1127 4y ago

Protectionism. Its why they shout for regulation. Keep the others out, force consumers to use your product, make lots of money.