Thread by @courtneymilan

A story, in five acts, about why you should not try and pull public, shady stuff and then get lawyers to pay attention to you.

Act 1: Josh Browder, CEO of Do Not Pay, advertising itself as the World’s First Robot Lawyer, decides that his AI is going to start practicing law.

No, he does not consult a lawyer about whether this is a good idea.

You will be unsurprised to hear that he does not *need* to consult a lawyer to find out that this is a bad idea; every actual lawyer on the internet plus the state bar association all tell him that perhaps he should not confidently announce he will be doing crimes.

Act 2: A good number of AI bros start the narrative that this is just protectionism and actually AIs would be great at law, or at least better than nothing.

@KathrynTewson, who is not a lawyer, but who works for one, decides to sign up for the DoNotPay service.

Over the course of a few hours, Kathryn asks DoNotPay to write her a defamation demand letter and a divorce settlement, as well as a demand letter for a small claims court breach of contract case. Full thread here.

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1617917837879963648?s=20

The first two documents say they will be delivered in one hour (one of them) and eight hours (the other), which suggests they’re not being AI generated.

The last one is spat out immediately and is not even a good copy paste. Just demand letter madlibs.

Over the next days, Josh blocks, then unblocks Kathryn, DMs her saying they blocked her account for “inauthentic” activity. He tells her that her documents will be delivered…soon…(blocks again) then refunds her money, then announces publicly that DoNotPay is giving up on AI.

(I tried to fit all the blocking and unblocking into one tweet, but I could not. Suffice to say it was a lot of blocking and unblocking. Also, that last tweet should say “giving up on AI lawyering.”)

You would think that announcing “WE ARE NOT DOING ANY MORE AI LAWYERING” would be the end of the story, done, Act 2, finished, but no.

Because you see, they didn’t *actually* give up on AI lawyering.

Act 3: It turns out that the site for DoNotPay is littered with the practice of law, including the very large splash screen you get when you first go there that breathlessly offers to sue anyone at the press of a button.

The site is littered with things that say that they will provide free legal advice for your immigration cases, which, by the way—please, oh my god, do not take this offer, do NOT

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1618800552217055232?s=20

Kathryn Tewson painstakingly lays a number of these out for the public, and instead of saying “thanks, wow, it was super useful for you to tell me all the ways I was falsely advertising services which, if I provided them, would put me in jail” Josh Browder bans her account.

Act 4: Josh explains this as her generating “inauthentic activity.”

Her response, which is very reasonable, is “it complies with the terms of service.”

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1618859992223981569?s=20

Josh then goes and changes the terms of service to say something like, “so sorry you are not able to use this service to TEST our service, you’re gonna have to go into this UNTESTED ha ha ha good luck suckers.”

That’s a paraphrase, you can see the actual brand new language circled in red here.

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1618870323214184448?s=20

Then, just to be clear, he added a KATHRYN TEWSON GET OFF MY WEBSITE DO YOU HEAR ME? clause to his terms of service.

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1619228524233240577?s=20

Someone should have told him that this is not a good way to make someone say “oh, sure, this entire thing sounds ethical and I’m sure I don’t need to look into this sketchy dude anymore now that I am banned from his product, because now we hit Act 5.

Anyway, Kathryn pointed out that Josh Browder had ALSO promised to donate money to cancel medical debt based on the number of likes/retweets that he had.

He’d promised to provide receipts, but hadn’t done it yet.

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1619569038526664704?s=20

After some prodding, he did post the receipt. But the receipt had a problem: the date on the receipt was two pixels higher than the word that said “Date” and wanna know who demonstrated that they weren’t properly aligned?

Did you guess @KathrynTewson?

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1619829297409298432?s=20

Kathryn went through and demonstrated that this was not the usual format of their receipts, acknowledge that perhaps the format changed between when she donated (as a test case) and when he donated, so perhaps that accounted for the difference.

But why stop there?

Kathryn contacted the organization he donated to and verified that he only made the donation four minutes *after* she originally called him out.

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1620181206636838932?s=20

Thus endeth Act 5.

I am not sure what Act 6 will be, but someday, someone is going to slice Browder wide open and discover that he is, in fact cake.

This guy was on the Forbes 30 under 30 list, gets venture capital funding, has a company worth several hundred million whose main product appears to be “practicing law without a license.”

Never tell me that guys like him get rich because they’re smart and they work hard.

They’re grifters, and they’re not even good at it.

Apparently @KathrynTewson has a t-shirt so if you have enjoyed this at all please enjoy her shirt which is both foreshadowing and summary.

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1620239675196862464?s=20

Anyway if I were the CEO of an AI legal services firm (which I will never be, because I’d be like “okay, if we wanna have a shot at this, we need to hire about twenty excellent lawyers in every field to train this puppy on every possible scenario for about the next 10 years”…

), and if I had a product that was even *slightly* usable—like, *slightly* usable!—I would WELCOME paralegals and attorneys jumping in, paying us our fee, and kicking the tires, because that would be great advertisement.

Update on Act 6, in which @KathrynTewson bullies (morally correct) Josh Browder into correcting his linkedin profile to correctly say that he dropped out of Stanford.

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1620581756666777601?s=20

Also Joshua Browder has now officially blocked me (yay). His rationale for blocking Kathryn was “too many notifications” and so I purposefully did not @ him or his company.

I fully support people blocking for any reason, but also lol.

At this point it’s not so much separate acts in the story as a series of delightful little epilogues, in which Kathryn (apparently blocked by Browder) just tweets at him like she’s his mom and he shamefacedly updates his resume and cancels accounts.

https://twitter.com/KathrynTewson/status/1620609590084898818?s=20