- We're just about to get our first pictures
from inside the courtroom with normal, average human lawyers
and we'd like to...
Ah! (image scratching)
Ladies and gentlemen, we've just lost the picture,
but what we've seen speaks for itself.
The courtroom has apparently been taken over,
conquered, if you will, by a master race of robot lawyers.
It's difficult to tell from this vantage point
whether they will arbitrate the captive earth men
or merely sue them into submission.
But one thing is for certain, there is no stopping them.
The autonomous attorneys will soon be here.
And I, for one, welcome our new robot lawyer overlords,
and I'd like to remind them
that as a trusted YouTube personality
I can be helpful in rounding up other human lawyers
to toil in their underground legal data centers.
Robots are coming to replace all of the lawyers.
(crowd cheering)
Wait, why are you clapping?
Last week, humanity took one step closer
to embracing our robot overlords
when tech wunderkind Joshua Browder
offered a $1 million bounty
to any lawyer willing to let his AI chatbot argue a case
before the Supreme Court.
On January 8th, Browder tweeted, quote,
"DoNotPay will pay any lawyer or person $1 million
"with an upcoming case
"in front of the United States Supreme Court
"to wear AirPods and let our robot lawyer argue the case
"by repeating exactly what it says.
"We are making this serious offer
"contingent on us coming to a formal agreement
"and all rules being followed.
"Please contact me if interested."
Browder was undeterred by the horde of actual lawyers
pointing out that this would violate
the high court's ironclad ban on laptops, cameras,
video, recorders, cell phones, tablets, smart watches,
or any electronic device of any kind in the chamber.
- Mr. McGill, you were warned
to leave your electronics outside.
- And in a follow-up tweet he scoffed,
"Ah yes, how could I forget
"about the AirPod security checkpoint,"
making clear that the 26-year-old CEO
had never set foot inside the Supreme Court,
which screens all entrants and is staffed by deputies
who would gladly tackle anyone stupid enough
to violate the ban on transmitting audio
of the ongoing argument.
Doesn't exactly bode well when the CEO of an AI law company
doesn't know the first thing about the law.
Yeah, I am not particularly worried
about AI replacing lawyers anytime soon.
So, how did we get here?
Well, it seems that the teenage Joshua Browder
was a bad driver, a very bad driver.
And even worse than his driving,
young Joshua could not for the life of him park his car.
Then he made the shocking discovery that, quote,
"The government issues tickets to make money,
"not necessarily to punish people."
So Browder did what any normal kid would do,
he wrote a chatbot to contest his parking tickets online,
and in no time he was lending the tool out to his friends
who were apparently also unable to decipher street signs
or maneuver their cars within 18 inches of the curb.
And in 2015, when he was an 18-year-old student
at Stanford University,
Browder launched the company DoNotPay from his dorm room,
reportedly writing the code in under two weeks,
working between the hours of midnight and 3 a.m.
And in no time Silicon Valley was calling
with generous offers to buy it.
Later, he spent time as a fellow
in a program founded by venture capitalist
and Silicon Valley visionary Peter Thiel,
which pays students to drop out of college
and spend two years building their companies
on the theory that, quote, "Some ideas can't wait."
Records show that at the time Thiel had $1,000
in outstanding parking tickets
and a court date coming up soon.
And while the bot was originally programmed
to contest parking tickets in the UK and New York,
Browder's company soon expanded
to include a host of services using text bots
and artificial intelligence.
If you want to cancel your gym membership
or apply for a fishing license
or schedule an appointment at the DMV,
there's a bot for that.
Maybe you want to fly with your emotional support animal
or close a bank account.
Maybe you want to marry an inmate in the county jail.
Maybe you are a Disney super fan
and you get your kicks snitching on the company
when someone on Etsy makes a Donald Duck tote bag.
Hey, man, whatever you're into.
What could possibly go wrong?
But as you might surmise,
there are some huge, huge problems with this.
For a monthly subscription of about $12,
you too could use Browder's bots
to report a pothole to your local government,
automatically cancel a subscription
at the end of your free trial,
or appeal your property tax bill,
tasks which you really shouldn't do yourself
without the supervision of a parent or guardian.
But if all this company was offering was a computer program
which demands to speak to the manager,
basically a Karen bot,
then we probably wouldn't be talking about it here today.
But DoNotPay hosts a bunch of other applications,
some of which at least skirt the line of practicing law
without a license.
Because advising someone on how to file
a Freedom of Information Act request
or even a complaint to the Securities Exchange Commission
is probably okay,
but instructing someone on how to file for divorce,
execute a power of attorney,
or craft a cease and desist letter
is a much, much dicier proposition.
And this was clearly apparent to the lawyers
who drafted the site's terms of service,
which remind customers over several pages
that DoNotPay is not a law firm but rather a, quote,
"Platform for legal information and self-help."
But that message is rather undercut
by Browder's own publicity
in which he says that he hopes to be-
- Like the general counsel for the consumer.
- And promises that the site will, quote,
"Make the $200 billion legal profession free for consumers."
I am not quaking in my shorts right now.
Now the website LegalZoom,
which offers users to customize legal documents
to suit their specific needs, had a similar problem
and engaged in protracted litigation
with the state of North Carolina
to ensure that it did not run afoul
of the state's ban on the unauthorized practice of law.
But its CEO wasn't making videos
in which he promised that the service would, quote,
"Find a loophole, insert that loophole into a legal letter,
"and then send that off to the right place,
"or even upload it to websites
"and have a robot do all the clicking on your behalf."
It's a bit difficult to maintain the fiction
that you're not practicing law
when your site bills itself
as, "The world's first robot lawyer."
But does this story sound familiar to anyone else,
Stanford University, precocious genius
beloved by Silicon Valley
aiming to revolutionize an industry
they never actually worked in,
despite experts in the field telling them
in no uncertain terms that their projects would not work?
Yes, he seems to be the latest technocrat
who has no idea what he's talking about
trying to propose technological solutions
to non-technological problems.
Browder says that he, quote,
"Couldn't afford to pay these tickets as a young person,
"so I became a legal expert about all the reasons
"why people could get out of parking tickets."
Really?
It's also of note that Joshua Browder's father,
Bill Browder, is a wildly successful hedge fund manager
who championed the Global Magnitsky Act
to sanction Russian authorities
after they arrested accountant Sergei Magnitsky
and left him to die in prison without medical care
for exposing state corruption.
But rich nerd who didn't feel like paying his parking fines
and dummied up a bot to contest them
is a lot less compelling origin story
than broke student ingeniously beats the system,
so here we are.
But with crypto being hammered and AI becoming the new Web3,
let's count all the ways that this actually won't work.
To begin with, Browder seems a little fuzzy
on what lawyers do all day.
- [Browder] Lawyers are charging hundreds of dollars an hour
for copying and pasting a few documents.
- Presumably the late Sergei Magnitsky
would probably disagree.
Ditto for the ones who fight to keep Josh's dad
one step ahead of Russian extradition attempts.
But if your definition of legal expertise is staring
at the parking code
and parsing the semantics of street signs,
then it's not surprising that you might think
a computer could easily accomplish that
with a few lines of code.
And if you're willing to believe that a bot is just as good
at drafting legal documents
as someone who went through years of formal education
and then learned their craft
under experienced practitioners,
then why wouldn't you believe
that artificial intelligence is capable of arguing
at the highest court in the land?
But honestly, that's sort of par for the course
among the Silicon Valley elite.
For example, Elon Musk was recently asked
on the witness stand why he believed
that a contract might not apply to him,
and he said, quote,
"I have some familiarity with the legal system.
"I mean, if you're in enough lawsuits,
"you pick up a few things along the way."
And what Elon keeps showing us time and time again
is even if you are a really smart person
who builds a great company,
you don't know what you don't know.
And here that seems to be a lot.
Browder's plan involves using OpenAI's ChatGPT-3
to feed dialogue to, quote,
"Any lawyer or person with an upcoming case
"in front of the United States Supreme Court."
Interesting that he thinks lawyer
and person are mutually exclusive,
although he wants to replace us
with Rosey from "The Jetsons,"
so yeah, I guess that probably tracks.
Actual lawyers, the human kind, will tell you
that the Supreme Court is one
of the most high bound institutions on earth.
The justices had to be dragged kicking and screaming
into the 21st century during COVID
when they finally permitted simultaneous transmission
of oral arguments.
They plan to allow cameras in the courtroom
in the year of never.
So anyone attempting to play ventriloquist dummy
via earpiece is likely to find himself
in the custody of the bailiff in pretty short order.
Moreover, any attorney who committed to turn the control
of the case over to a robot would leave that person open
to a charge of malpractice,
which they would definitely lose,
while the person paying the lawyer to do it might be charged
with the unauthorized practice of law.
And that's probably true for anyone paying
for a pro se litigant to let the machine argue
on their behalf as well.
But even if this weren't illegal,
it's worth noting that Browder's plan relies
on a brand new off-the-rack technology
that is largely untested in the real world.
And even so, Browder's proofs of concept
are decidedly mixed.
Earlier this month, he posted a video to Twitter
claiming to show a chatbot using a deepfake of his voice
to successfully negotiate with a representative
from Wells Fargo to secure a refund of wire fees.
The video has since been removed
for violating Twitter's terms of service,
and the bank claims that it was deceptively edited anyway.
But even taken at face value,
"Vice" reports that the recording contained long pauses
where the bank employee waited patiently
for the chat program to formulate a response.
And that's definitely not going to fly in court.
- Just a sec.
Ah. Objection.
- Plus, it's pretty noticeable
if your plan is to insert this bot
into an actual hearing by stealth,
the technology is probably not there yet.
Although lawyers are increasingly relying
on artificial intelligence to help them
sort through a mountain of documents
to find the ones that are relevant to their cases,
a real world application
that Browder seems wholly uninterested in
since it doesn't involve blowing up an entire industry.
AI is definitely helping with the practice of law,
just not without the humans.
They seem to be pretty necessary.
And Browder's other big success
involved letting the chatbot engage
in a very stilted negotiation with a Comcast agent,
or possibly one of Comcast's own chatbots,
to reduce an engineer's bill.
How did it do this?
Well, it used a mix of neural networks,
hidden Markov models, and lying.
Quote, "The AI just exaggerated the internet outages,
"similar to how a customer would."
He then acknowledged that the tool was, quote,
"Not perfect yet,"
and promised to, quote, "Sterilize outputs before launch."
This touches on another problem with his genius plan
to unleash this program on the Supreme Court: the bots lie.
In fact, ChatGPT's propensity to make up things
that sound true, releasing a stream of, quote, "Fluent BS,"
got it temporarily banned from message boards
on the coding site Stack Overflow.
And the line between fluent BS
and sanctionable lack of candor before a tribunal
is not one that you wanna find yourself
on the wrong side of.
Browder himself acknowledged this limitation
in a conversation with "Politico,"
but assured reporters
that his company had gone to great lengths
to ensure that the bot will be as honest
as George Washington in open court.
And if you can't trust a guy who programs deepfakes
to impersonate himself online, I mean, who can't you trust?
And in response to the potential illegality,
Browder told "Gizmodo" that he might rely
on accommodations for people who are deaf or hard of hearing
to smuggle the earpiece into a hearing.
But no fear, according to "Politico,"
Browder's company will soon test the bot out
in real court somewhere.
He claims to have discovered two jurisdictions
where his harebrained scheme is, quote,
"Not outright illegal," although he's not saying where
less the courts in question find out
and decide that actually it is illegal after all.
Though, I'm not sure that I would rely on his understanding
of what is legal and illegal
in parsing the local rules of different courts.
But in one hearing, the defendant will head into court
with a recording device and earbuds
transmitting the hearing live
and repeating whatever the AI whispers into his ear.
The other is a traffic court being conducted via Zoom,
which shouldn't be that difficult,
except that Browder is toying with the idea
of having the AI clone the defendant's voice
and speak the words itself.
- I like your funny words, magic man!
- Although he admits that, quote,
"That could get us into a lot of trouble."
And as Browder sees it,
his trouble road testing the technology
is all part of plot by the legal profession
to preserve its stranglehold on the marketplace
and hold off the march of progress.
Quote, "There's all these gatekeepers.
"There's laws. There's governments to work around."
Yeah, a profession that requires you to pass the bar
in every single legal jurisdiction in the United States.
I can't imagine that the lawyers would wanna keep a monopoly
on all of this profession.
And if you were wondering
what services DoNotPay actually offers to people right now,
well, thankfully, paralegal extraordinaire Kathryn Tewson
has already gone through a lot of the services
that the website offers.
She has a patience that I simply don't have,
signed up for an account and went through what they offer.
And DoNotPay seems to offer a whole bunch of services
that really, really seem like the practice of law,
including being able to sue anyone in small claims court
and divorce, divorce settlement agreements.
Kathryn went through the process of creating a demand letter
connected to a small claims court,
filled in the information,
and found that basically it's just a service
that puts in the information that you provide into a form.
It doesn't seem to offer anything related to AI
at the moment, and there's no option
to use the real-time AI lawyer services either.
The end result is a demand letter
that is basically worse than nothing,
that is sort of nonsense, doesn't really further the ball,
and it really demonstrates why you want a lawyer
to draft these things.
The service doesn't seem to do any actual legal analysis
and seems to encourage you to file a claim
in small claims court
that is actually too big to file in small claims court.
And it's not entirely clear,
although this claims to be an AI company,
there seems to be a lot of human intervention
in all of these different results,
which is not great when you're doing things
that may actually qualify as the practice of law
and, you know, the humans might have some liability
for that offense.
But look, this might be hard to understand
for people that don't actually practice law,
but practicing law is more than just arranging magic words
in the right order while trying to sound human.
Lawyers get paid to exercise their judgment.
You hire a lawyer
because you know that he or she understands divorce law
better than you do.
They can draft a business partnership
that accomplishes what you want.
They've been around the courthouse long enough
that you're better off taking the plea agreement.
And unlike Joshua Browder, they can actually read the room.
And if something goes wrong and they give you bad advice,
then you can sue your lawyer for malpractice.
So maybe you'll be fine if you represent yourself
in traffic court
or even if you let a chatbot whisper into your ear
during a traffic hearing,
but when the cost of getting it wrong is high,
like it might be if you're in the Supreme Court,
a human lawyer is worth the money.
And a very tiny number of lawyers
will spend their entire careers honing their craft
to be good enough to argue before the Supreme Court,
and they're not about to be replaced by a chatbot
that can barely negotiate with a customer service agent.
So if someone tells you that they've got a robot
that can feed you lines in court
or, God forbid, clone your voice and speak for you,
maybe tell 'em to go away and come back
when they've mastered parallel parking.
And hello, this is Devin from the future,
and I'm happy to report we got 'em, boys,
because Joshua Browder is reporting
that after being threatened by state prosecutors
for the unlawful practice of law
and violating all kinds of court restrictions,
he's going to back down and he's not moving forward
with having an AI actually whisper into someone's ear
in even traffic court.
And they're actually removing a lot of the services
that DoNotPay currently offers
that look like legal practice.
So from the public backlash and the criticism,
it looks like they are doing the right thing
not offering legal services
that could have a dramatically bad effect on people
and focusing on consumer-related things
rather than the practice of law.
So although the lawyers weren't exactly holding their breath
on this, they can breathe a tiny sigh of relief
that at least people are not going to be harmed
by the negligent practice of law
at the helm of an AI chatbot.
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