9 ms·

>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

>DoNotPay also did not "hire or retain any attorneys" to help verify AI outputs or validate DoNotPay's legal claims. Wow, that's brave. Create a wrapper around ChatGPT, call it a lawyer, and never check the output. $193k fine seems like peanuts. Sometimes I think about where I would be in life if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this.

sixhobbits 2y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822289
- ziddoap 2y ago
  Not sure about the history, I based my comment on this quote from the article: >[...] DoNotPay's legal service [...] relying on an API with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Perhaps they rolled their own chatbot then later switched to ChatGPT? Either way, they probably should have a lawyer involved at some point in the process.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    My understanding is that they had much more linear automation of very specific, narrow, high-frequency processes — basically form letters plus some process automation — before they got GPT and decided they could do a lot more “lawyer” things with it.
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
    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).
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - everforward 2y ago
      "Lawyer" is a regulated term that comes with a lot of expectations of the "lawyer" (liability for malpractice, a bunch of duties, etc). You can't just say that something is a lawyer any more than you could do the same with doctors or police officers. Machines are also not allowed to be the "author" of court documents if they actually get to court (so far as I'm aware). A lawyer has to sign off and claim it as their own work, and doing so without the lawyer reading it is pretty taboo (I think maybe sanctionable by the BAR but I could be wrong).
      - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
        >You can't just say that something is a lawyer any more than you could do the same with doctors or police officers Do you think WebMD should be renamed? Lawyers seem to be better at defending their turf than doctors or cops.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  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.
  - faangguyindia 2y ago
    It's love and hate relationship with AI. All engineers I know in tech are bashing AI left and right and going home to work on AI projects in their free time.
    - dukeyukey 2y ago
      You can simultanously believe that AI: * Is massively overhyped by certain persons and companies, and * Is both interesting and has loads of promise, so is worth working on in your own time They aren't contradictory at all.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        Actually, I think they are the opposite of contradictory. This tech is dumb, funny, new, and maybe it has potential in the right (low-stakes) applications. Meanwhile, I dunno, I have some begrudging admiration for the folks getting rich selling premium GEMMs, but eventually they are going to piss off all their investors and cause a giant mess. Like good luck guys, get that money, but please don’t take us all down with you.
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      The ship is sinking, and we're swimming towards the iceberg.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      Pretty classic hacker behavior. "This sucks. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make it better because everyone else working on it is an idiot and I, alone, see the True Way Forward."
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > it used to be pretty positively received on HN I think people love the idea of DoNotPay: A magical internet machine that saves people money and fights back against evil corporations. Before ChatGPT they were basically mad libs for finding and filling out the right form. Helpful for people who couldn't figure out how to navigate situations by themselves. There is real value in this. However, they've also been running the same growth hacking playbooks that people disdain: False advertising, monthly subscriptions for services that most people need in a one-off manner, claiming AI features to be more reliable than they are, releasing untested products on consumers. Once you look past the headline of the company you find they're not entirely altruistic, they're just another startup playing the growth hacking game and all that comes with it.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    There's altruism, running a business, and unrestrained avarice. Sometimes libertarians can be as prone to equating the first two as leftists are the latter.
    - thrance 2y ago
      In your world, it seems the leftists have it figured out. The purpose of a business is always to maximize profit. EDIT: yeah, yeah, I hear you. You can survive on VC money, and maximize share price instead of focusing on profit. You can also be a small business owned by good people just trying to make a living, but then you still have to not get drowned out by more ruthless competition. The purpose of a business is not always to maximize profit.
      - dpassens 2y ago
        The purpose of a business is whatever its owners want it to be. Typically, this is maximizing profit, but it could be anything, like getting paid for what you like to do.
      - adventured 2y ago
        > 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.
- gortok 2y ago
  > 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?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    Yep. Turns out HN is just avg people that think they're really smart because they know how to write code.
    - skinnymuch 2y ago
      Literally why I stopped going to the comments or commenting. The blind arrogance of tech bros is up there.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Given the scope of the topic it appealed in 2016, parking tickets in two specific cities, I can see such a petty case like that be automated. The expansion in 2017 to seeking refuge seems like it'd be a bigger hurdle. But I wouldn't be surprised if that process can be automated a lot as well. Seems like the killing blow here was claiming it can outright replace legal advice. Wonder how much that lie made compared to the settlement. But yes, HN in general is a lot more empathetic towards AI than what the average consensus seems to be based on surveys this year.
- hinkley 2y ago
  On a long enough timeline we all (with the exception of narcissists) see our younger selves as little idiots.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  > It's something I personally find very bizarre, but I've definitely noticed that a lot of people have a very strong mental block about doing things on a computer, or even a browser. It's interesting that many have expressed something similar in regards to the current LLMs, for programming for example: that even if their output isn't exactly ideal, they still lower the barrier of entry for trying to do certain things, like starting a project in Python from scratch in a stack that you aren't entirely familiar with yet.
- paulddraper 2y ago
  > it used to be pretty positively received on HN HN is a fickle beast
ryandrake 2y ago
> Sometimes I think about where I would be in life if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this. I think about this all the time. If I didn’t have a conscience, I would be retired by now.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  You might be retiring in jail, though.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - rollcat 2y ago
    Unfortunately, "if it's an app, it's legal".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dangsux 2y ago
  [dead]
gosub100 2y ago
> if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this. You mean you'd be like any other corporation or property manager or attorney? If you operate in the confines of the law that's all that matters. If you give normal people the same power to litigate as a billionaire, that's a feature, not a bug.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >If you operate in the confines of the law that's all that matters. This is uh.. Yeah. This is what I meant by having no moral or ethical qualms. There are things that I find immoral which are not illegal. I do not do those things, even though legally I could.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    so religious zealotry? man-in-the-sky said "no do that!" ? "This is uh.. Yeah." - can you clarify this remark please?
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      >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.
    - photonthug 2y ago
      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.
Palmik 2y ago
Did they help regular people defend themselves while saving on legal costs or not? Most of these cases wouldn't be defended at all otherwise.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  This is exactly the right question. Did they provide value to the user? Yes, nearly any situation in life involving money can be improved with a top lawyer on retainer, but that isn't always viable or economical
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >Did they help regular people defend themselves while saving on legal costs or not? Do you get a free pass to do shitty things as long as you do some good things too? I am totally onboard with the concept of the business, just not this particular implementation of it.
  - pb7 2y ago
    That's a little bit how the law works. If you get sentenced for a conviction, your good deeds will affect the decision. Sometimes people get off entirely based on who they are (e.g. athletes, execs, etc).
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      >If you get sentenced for a conviction, your good deeds will affect the decision. Definitely a valid point, but I don't feel comfortable applying the same idea to inanimate entities like corporations. >Sometimes people get off entirely based on who they are (e.g. athletes, execs, etc). On a personal level, I have never agreed with this.
    - freejazz 2y ago
      In that one circumstance. You don't get to do a little murder because you donated to a charity. Why even bother to act like this is some sort of principle that underlines the legal system?
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Is "brave" a euphemism for stupid.
- lexicality 2y ago
  I can think of very few situations where someone would say "wow that's brave" and not mean "wow you're an idiot"
  - dr_sausages 2y ago
    [dead]
- omoikane 2y ago
  I heard it's the British way of saying "that's insane". https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574974/etymology-of-brave-meaning-insane https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574974/etymology...
Narhem 2y ago
Crazy people take any advice from people without citing the exact legal clause.
- pdabbadabba 2y ago
  Then you must find it very frustrating to actually receive legal advice, because it is often more complicated than that and there sometimes is no such clause!
alexey-salmin 2y ago
Given how bad an average attorney is, I wonder if chatgpt would actually be an improvement.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  The average chatgpt legal brief just makes up case law, which is definitely not an improvement even over the worst attorneys out there.
exe34 2y ago
> Sometimes I think about where I would be in life if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this. I invented smaller variants of deliveroo, airbnb and uber in my mind, around 2008, but I thought no, the only way to make any money would be to exploit people and break laws. honestly, what held me back was more the hassle of lawyers to make it all work. I didn't think I could stomach the effort.
MangoCoffee 2y ago
Another Silicon Valley startup looking to get rich quick, following in the footsteps of Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, WeWork...etc, which have all played in the legal grey areas
bloodyplonker22 2y ago
To prove that that DoNotPay does not work, they will use DoNotPay on themselves to defend against this case.
debarshri 2y ago
Donotpay should have used donotpay to fight FTC ruling back. That would have been the ultimate outcome if they would have won.
jlarocco 2y ago
I'm not sure they mean "LLM based AI". To me it looks like they automated some boilerplate legal forms and marketted it as "AI" to capitalize on the hype.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >I'm not sure they mean "LLM based AI" The article states that they use ChatGPT.
datavirtue 2y ago
What is morally or ethically wrong with what they did? Maybe it's morally or ethically wrong to prosecute them and take their belongings?
- ziddoap 2y ago
  I consider boldly lying about the efficacy of your product in your advertisements to be unethical. You don't, I guess. That's fine.
- fortyseven 2y ago
  Let's ask a chatbot and find out.
lancesells 2y ago
> 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.
guluarte 2y ago
lmao at least the should have finetuned gpt4
refurb 2y ago
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.
entreunemployed 2y ago
Wow buddy. I guess we could say the dollar amount you were willing to forego is the price of your sense of superiority.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  Haha, yeah, feeling very superior over here with my... not lying to my customers. Yep!

sixhobbits 2y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13822289

ziddoap 2y ago
Not sure about the history, I based my comment on this quote from the article: >[...] DoNotPay's legal service [...] relying on an API with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Perhaps they rolled their own chatbot then later switched to ChatGPT? Either way, they probably should have a lawyer involved at some point in the process.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  My understanding is that they had much more linear automation of very specific, narrow, high-frequency processes — basically form letters plus some process automation — before they got GPT and decided they could do a lot more “lawyer” things with it.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
  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).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - everforward 2y ago
    "Lawyer" is a regulated term that comes with a lot of expectations of the "lawyer" (liability for malpractice, a bunch of duties, etc). You can't just say that something is a lawyer any more than you could do the same with doctors or police officers. Machines are also not allowed to be the "author" of court documents if they actually get to court (so far as I'm aware). A lawyer has to sign off and claim it as their own work, and doing so without the lawyer reading it is pretty taboo (I think maybe sanctionable by the BAR but I could be wrong).
    - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
      >You can't just say that something is a lawyer any more than you could do the same with doctors or police officers Do you think WebMD should be renamed? Lawyers seem to be better at defending their turf than doctors or cops.
ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
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.
- faangguyindia 2y ago
  It's love and hate relationship with AI. All engineers I know in tech are bashing AI left and right and going home to work on AI projects in their free time.
  - dukeyukey 2y ago
    You can simultanously believe that AI: * Is massively overhyped by certain persons and companies, and * Is both interesting and has loads of promise, so is worth working on in your own time They aren't contradictory at all.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      Actually, I think they are the opposite of contradictory. This tech is dumb, funny, new, and maybe it has potential in the right (low-stakes) applications. Meanwhile, I dunno, I have some begrudging admiration for the folks getting rich selling premium GEMMs, but eventually they are going to piss off all their investors and cause a giant mess. Like good luck guys, get that money, but please don’t take us all down with you.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    The ship is sinking, and we're swimming towards the iceberg.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Pretty classic hacker behavior. "This sucks. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make it better because everyone else working on it is an idiot and I, alone, see the True Way Forward."
Aurornis 2y ago
> it used to be pretty positively received on HN I think people love the idea of DoNotPay: A magical internet machine that saves people money and fights back against evil corporations. Before ChatGPT they were basically mad libs for finding and filling out the right form. Helpful for people who couldn't figure out how to navigate situations by themselves. There is real value in this. However, they've also been running the same growth hacking playbooks that people disdain: False advertising, monthly subscriptions for services that most people need in a one-off manner, claiming AI features to be more reliable than they are, releasing untested products on consumers. Once you look past the headline of the company you find they're not entirely altruistic, they're just another startup playing the growth hacking game and all that comes with it.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  There's altruism, running a business, and unrestrained avarice. Sometimes libertarians can be as prone to equating the first two as leftists are the latter.
  - thrance 2y ago
    In your world, it seems the leftists have it figured out. The purpose of a business is always to maximize profit. EDIT: yeah, yeah, I hear you. You can survive on VC money, and maximize share price instead of focusing on profit. You can also be a small business owned by good people just trying to make a living, but then you still have to not get drowned out by more ruthless competition. The purpose of a business is not always to maximize profit.
    - dpassens 2y ago
      The purpose of a business is whatever its owners want it to be. Typically, this is maximizing profit, but it could be anything, like getting paid for what you like to do.
    - adventured 2y ago
      > 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.
gortok 2y ago
> 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?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Yep. Turns out HN is just avg people that think they're really smart because they know how to write code.
  - skinnymuch 2y ago
    Literally why I stopped going to the comments or commenting. The blind arrogance of tech bros is up there.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Given the scope of the topic it appealed in 2016, parking tickets in two specific cities, I can see such a petty case like that be automated. The expansion in 2017 to seeking refuge seems like it'd be a bigger hurdle. But I wouldn't be surprised if that process can be automated a lot as well. Seems like the killing blow here was claiming it can outright replace legal advice. Wonder how much that lie made compared to the settlement. But yes, HN in general is a lot more empathetic towards AI than what the average consensus seems to be based on surveys this year.
hinkley 2y ago
On a long enough timeline we all (with the exception of narcissists) see our younger selves as little idiots.
KronisLV 2y ago
> It's something I personally find very bizarre, but I've definitely noticed that a lot of people have a very strong mental block about doing things on a computer, or even a browser. It's interesting that many have expressed something similar in regards to the current LLMs, for programming for example: that even if their output isn't exactly ideal, they still lower the barrier of entry for trying to do certain things, like starting a project in Python from scratch in a stack that you aren't entirely familiar with yet.
paulddraper 2y ago
> it used to be pretty positively received on HN HN is a fickle beast

ryandrake 2y ago

> Sometimes I think about where I would be in life if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this. I think about this all the time. If I didn’t have a conscience, I would be retired by now.

whiplash451 2y ago
You might be retiring in jail, though.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rollcat 2y ago
  Unfortunately, "if it's an app, it's legal".
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dangsux 2y ago
[dead]

gosub100 2y ago

> if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this. You mean you'd be like any other corporation or property manager or attorney? If you operate in the confines of the law that's all that matters. If you give normal people the same power to litigate as a billionaire, that's a feature, not a bug.

ziddoap 2y ago
>If you operate in the confines of the law that's all that matters. This is uh.. Yeah. This is what I meant by having no moral or ethical qualms. There are things that I find immoral which are not illegal. I do not do those things, even though legally I could.
- gosub100 2y ago
  so religious zealotry? man-in-the-sky said "no do that!" ? "This is uh.. Yeah." - can you clarify this remark please?
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    >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.
  - photonthug 2y ago
    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.

Palmik 2y ago

Did they help regular people defend themselves while saving on legal costs or not? Most of these cases wouldn't be defended at all otherwise.

ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
This is exactly the right question. Did they provide value to the user? Yes, nearly any situation in life involving money can be improved with a top lawyer on retainer, but that isn't always viable or economical
ziddoap 2y ago
>Did they help regular people defend themselves while saving on legal costs or not? Do you get a free pass to do shitty things as long as you do some good things too? I am totally onboard with the concept of the business, just not this particular implementation of it.
- pb7 2y ago
  That's a little bit how the law works. If you get sentenced for a conviction, your good deeds will affect the decision. Sometimes people get off entirely based on who they are (e.g. athletes, execs, etc).
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    >If you get sentenced for a conviction, your good deeds will affect the decision. Definitely a valid point, but I don't feel comfortable applying the same idea to inanimate entities like corporations. >Sometimes people get off entirely based on who they are (e.g. athletes, execs, etc). On a personal level, I have never agreed with this.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    In that one circumstance. You don't get to do a little murder because you donated to a charity. Why even bother to act like this is some sort of principle that underlines the legal system?

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Is "brave" a euphemism for stupid.

lexicality 2y ago
I can think of very few situations where someone would say "wow that's brave" and not mean "wow you're an idiot"
- dr_sausages 2y ago
  [dead]
omoikane 2y ago
I heard it's the British way of saying "that's insane". https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574974/etymology-of-brave-meaning-insane https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/574974/etymology...

Narhem 2y ago

Crazy people take any advice from people without citing the exact legal clause.

pdabbadabba 2y ago
Then you must find it very frustrating to actually receive legal advice, because it is often more complicated than that and there sometimes is no such clause!

alexey-salmin 2y ago

Given how bad an average attorney is, I wonder if chatgpt would actually be an improvement.

jcranmer 2y ago
The average chatgpt legal brief just makes up case law, which is definitely not an improvement even over the worst attorneys out there.

exe34 2y ago

> Sometimes I think about where I would be in life if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this. I invented smaller variants of deliveroo, airbnb and uber in my mind, around 2008, but I thought no, the only way to make any money would be to exploit people and break laws. honestly, what held me back was more the hassle of lawyers to make it all work. I didn't think I could stomach the effort.

MangoCoffee 2y ago

Another Silicon Valley startup looking to get rich quick, following in the footsteps of Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, WeWork...etc, which have all played in the legal grey areas

bloodyplonker22 2y ago

To prove that that DoNotPay does not work, they will use DoNotPay on themselves to defend against this case.

debarshri 2y ago

Donotpay should have used donotpay to fight FTC ruling back. That would have been the ultimate outcome if they would have won.

jlarocco 2y ago

I'm not sure they mean "LLM based AI". To me it looks like they automated some boilerplate legal forms and marketted it as "AI" to capitalize on the hype.

ziddoap 2y ago
>I'm not sure they mean "LLM based AI" The article states that they use ChatGPT.

datavirtue 2y ago

What is morally or ethically wrong with what they did? Maybe it's morally or ethically wrong to prosecute them and take their belongings?

ziddoap 2y ago
I consider boldly lying about the efficacy of your product in your advertisements to be unethical. You don't, I guess. That's fine.
fortyseven 2y ago
Let's ask a chatbot and find out.

lancesells 2y ago

> 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.

guluarte 2y ago

lmao at least the should have finetuned gpt4

refurb 2y ago

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.

entreunemployed 2y ago

Wow buddy. I guess we could say the dollar amount you were willing to forego is the price of your sense of superiority.

ziddoap 2y ago
Haha, yeah, feeling very superior over here with my... not lying to my customers. Yep!