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

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

> 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.

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

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.

Is "brave" a euphemism for stupid.

What is morally or ethically wrong with what they did?

Maybe it's morally or ethically wrong to prosecute them and take their belongings?

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

> 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.

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.

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

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

> 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.

>$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).

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.

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.

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.)

Ironic given the app’s purpose.

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.

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.

Haha, my thoughts precisely. The first 4 words of the title were bewildering for me for a few seconds.

Could they...employ their own services?

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.

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.

In 2021 a literal discord group raised several million dollars so take that into consideration.

In the US, parking and private parking lots are easily one of the scammiest businesses.

Link to related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41638199

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...)

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?

> 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-...

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.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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.