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> 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?
Too bad that the legal system is made of lawyers, whose interests run directly contrary to that ideal.
Is that your experience with traffic tickets?
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

> 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
> 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.
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.

> 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.

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."
The ship is sinking, and we're swimming towards the iceberg.
>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.

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.
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).

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.