by the DoNotTest-DoNotPay department
Well, a lot has happened since I started dabbling with DoNotPay’s “world’s first robot lawyer.” First, Joshua Browder, the CEO of DoNotPay, contacted me via direct message (DM) and informed me that he would be banning me until 2:00pm the next day – Tuesday 24 for “non-genuine activity”, a term den he neither explains nor defines. Josh then claimed he would retire from the industry altogether, canceling his courtroom stunt and saying he would disable all legal tools on DoNotPay.com. He said he was doing it because it was a distraction, but the fact that he was citing the very same two documents I was waiting to receive seemed like a hell of a coincidence.
But plus ça change, plus c’est la même fucking chosen, as the poet says. Here’s what hasn’t changed: I still don’t have my documents and Josh still hasn’t answered the questions I asked him like he promised.
In his direct message, Josh said he would be willing to answer any questions I asked in good faith. I took him at his word and answered the email he sent me announcing his retirement with the following four questions:
I have asked all of these questions in good faith and for good reason. Josh posits – over and over and over – that DoNotPay contains an artificial intelligence robot lawyer, going so far as to say that it uses AI instead of “human knowledge”. The only document I got was one that made no promise of adjustment or that it would contain “the most relevant” laws for anything; The ones that required this type of analysis were the ones that got stuck in multi-hour deadlines and ultimately never delivered. Given how much weight he gives to these claims, I think it’s fair to question and test them.
The articles, or “blog posts” as Josh calls them, are a slightly different situation. There are a TON of them, and they are all published with no date or author. But many of these articles have significant flaws, both legal and factual, and if relied on, they could get into serious trouble. And although I didn’t really expect him to answer the question about the subpoena, he opened the door for me brag about it firstas far as I’m concerned.
(Only two sentences in this screenshot above are entirely correct. I won’t tell you which two because I’m not a lawyer.)
To my great disappointment, this email was completely ignored.
It wasn’t because he was too busy taking out all his bots, either. On Thursday evening I logged back into the site to check and found that all of the prompts I had previously accessed were there were still available, except for the two that Josh specifically mentioned in his tweet — the defamation letter and the divorce settlement. But even these were still advertised; Each “blog post” on the site contains a sign-up teaser that promotes access to the site’s legal and other services, with no indication that they will be inaccessible until DoNotPay has your funds. One particularly egregious blog post that advertised “free legal advice” for those seeking help navigating the immigration process to become an American citizen finally pushed me over the edge, so I pinged Josh to help him out to remind you that I’m still waiting for my documents Answer my questions, let that be for a while, and then started another thread about all the ways in which he was anything but open about the truth. While writing this thread, I discovered that I was suddenly banned from the site; Not only could I not log in, but every time I tried, I got an error message that just said, “Something went wrong.”
It took Josh less than an hour to DM me and let me know that my money was refunded in full and complaining that I was lying about the “bots” still being active, though he later admitted that only 7 bots had gone down in the last 36 hours (out of advertised 1,000):
When I told him that I had tested it myself and even generated new documents and cases, he asked, “Was your use authentic?” Conversation.
After this pause had dragged on for a while, something nagged at me. I went back and looked at that question and answer again and I thought, “What’s the deal with the terms of service that suddenly made him want to leave immediately?”
By sheer coincidence, someone – not me (at least I don’t think so) – had archived the DoNotPay Terms of Service pretty much exactly when I started tweeting my thread, so I know exactly what they said back then.
It also meant that just two hours later I could see exactly what had changed between that time and this one: Josh added a clause to the Terms of Service Prohibit users from testing the site before using it in a live dispute.
If you can’t see that, right after I told him I wasn’t violating his terms, he seemed to add the following to his terms:
You declare that any dispute or inquiry submitted is a real issue you are having. You are responsible for any damages caused to DoNotPay or others by fake, spurious or test disputes.
So now “test” disputes are in violation of the terms?
This change has been made after He blocked me without warning. He claims he told me to “keep it true” but he absolutely didn’t, and his claim that I “triggered his anti-spam” by creating 10 or 15 new cases seems counterintuitive violating the promises of its website that you can have an “unlimited number of documents.”
He didn’t answer my questions other than to say, “No, the letters aren’t hand-typed and no, we didn’t write them,” which…didn’t answer my questions at all. And then he blocked me.
Here you go. Joshua Browder, CEO of DoNotPay.com, would rather block me, suspend my account, change their terms of service to say no any test usage at alland claiming he would retire from the Legal Services industry for which his website is CLOTHED with branding, instead of showing me the two documents I created and attempted to purchase.
I wonder what he doesn’t want me to see?
Filed under: ai, ai attorney, joshua browder, robot attorney, conditions, exam, unauthorized legal practice
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