Episode 157: BLEEP BLOOP I OBJECT YOUR HONOR BLEEP BLOOP
Blocked and Reported
Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal
4.6 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2023
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After Jesse regales Katie with his famous Boston Bit (tm) and Katie catches Jesse up on every single thing that has happened on Twitter since he left, the two discuss the case of DoNotPay and Joshua Browder. Are we on the brink of robot lawyers effortlessly guiding underprivileged clients through difficult legal proceedings? Or is, like, literally none of that going to happen?
Show notes/Links
Anti-Italian hate crime
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/03/23/tiktok-pasta-blender-reaction/
Beware The Hard R:
“Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York”
Browder <3 Buffett
Above The Law on the then-new version of DoNotPay
The legal actions offered on DoNotPay cover an impressive range. One feature allows users to file a claim in any small claims court in the country, including all 3,000 counties in the 50 states. Perhaps even more significant in the current political climate, DoNotPay includes a service that claims to help users obtain green cards and visas, eliminating the usual service fees. Other service offerings include searching for hidden class action settlements you’re owed, fighting credit card and overdraft fees, suing tech companies for data breaches, and collecting money from hotel and airline bookings through price protection guarantees. And, of course, you can still fight parking tickets, which is how DoNotPay got its start in the first place.
The Verge in 2022
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/13/23505873/donotpay-negotiate-bills-ai-chatbot
DoNotPay, the company that bills itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer,” is launching a new AI-powered chatbot that can help you negotiate bills and cancel subscriptions without having to deal with customer service. In a demo of the tool posted by DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder, the chatbot manages to get a discount on a Comcast internet bill through Xfinity’s live chat. Once it connects with a customer service representative, the bot asks for a better rate using account details provided by the customer. The chatbot cites problems with Xfinity’s services and threatens to take legal action, to which the representative responds by offering to take $10 off the customer’s monthly internet bill.
HISTORY COMING Y’ALL
Techdirt weighs in
HMMM
People also point out a rather straightforward obstacle to Browder’s plan now memorialized in one of those helpful boxes
GO BIG OR GO HOME
Kathryn Tewson
https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson
Deleted tweet
More on deleted tweets
In one tweet, Browder apparently said that his team had issued a subpoena written by the AI to get the officer involved to appear in court
Not strictly against the rules
Not “outright illegal”
The website no work
“Hey - thank you for signing up for donotpay. We have good intentions and are happy to respond to your feedback.” [REBLOCKS]
“Good morning! Bad news”
incredibly exciting announcements
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
NPR covers the aborted robot lawyer attempt
Actual legal experts
https://blog.simplejustice.us/2023/01/22/a-i-for-the-defense/
It gets worse
Very literal phrasing
STOP! STOP! HE’S ALREADY DEAD
Might as well look into earlier claims too
The Guardian’s source for this claim is… a Medium post from Browder himself.
TechDirt notes that they’d been suspicious of those same claims way back in 2017, but decided not to run the story
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/07/heres-the-article-we-didnt-run-back-in-2017-about-donotpay/
So recently Browder went on the LawNext podcast and it didn’t go well — he calls the controversy “A Bit Of A Nothingburger”
Tewson actually went on the very next episode
Ruh roh
https://www.courthousenews.com/robot-lawyers-not-yet-lawsuit-says/
All’s well that ends well?
Dead cougar or whatever
Image: “robot lawyer in court” via DALL-E 2
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Jesse. How you doing? I'm okay, Katie. Um, which update do you want first bird wore up? |
| 0:16.0 | Well, I want to hear, I want to hear about prison, of course. |
| 0:18.4 | Prison prison continues to be great. I don't understand why everyone complains. It is. |
| 0:24.2 | Again, this is the structure I needed. |
| 0:27.3 | Hip-a-prison is particularly soft because all they do is they tell you private medical |
| 0:32.6 | information about other prisoners. And if you keep it secret, um, you get out early on good |
| 0:38.4 | behavior. Really? I'm surprised. That must be hard for you. I've been. |
| 0:41.6 | Well, so example, so example, my cellmate Ronnie has really bad herpes. Oh, shit. Fuck. |
| 0:47.9 | You weren't supposed to say that were you. Don't tell anybody. This isn't going out to everybody, |
| 0:52.4 | right? It's just practice. It's just practice. Yeah. Uh, no, I'm actually in Boston. |
| 0:58.3 | Also, no, it's, what going on? Also, it was. |
| 1:01.8 | Boston, to many people is a sort of prison. Do you want, which update do you want first? |
| 1:06.0 | The three choices, bird wars, temperature, local politics. Okay. Let's start in order of how |
| 1:13.5 | much I care. Uh, uh, okay. Let's start with board wars. Okay. So it appears the pigeon wars |
| 1:20.8 | back in Brooklyn are drawing to a close. However, this is going to sound made up by first night, |
| 1:28.9 | morning, back in the Boston suburbs. I'll walk into the south of a woodpecker. Oh, God. |
| 1:34.7 | So there's a woodpecker nesting very close to my childhood bedroom. The pigeons, I think are |
| 1:39.9 | under control. I can confirm this and I'll definitely do an update when I'm back in Brooklyn. |
| 1:43.4 | Now I'm dealing with a woodpecker. Did the pigeons send the woodpecker? I was going to say, |
| 1:48.2 | I think what happened, this is going to sound a little bit weird. I think the pigeons telepathically |
| 1:56.2 | communicated with a Boston-based woodpecker and dispatched it here to torment birds do that. |
| 2:00.3 | But if there's any ornithologists listening, let me know if that makes sense. I'm sure it does. |
... |
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