> When you're poor you have the choice between an AI that may work or you'll be defending yourself.
This is a thing that lots of people say about unethical businesses, and I'm a little skeptical about it at this point. A couple of objections I have:
- You have a constitutional right to legal representation when accused of a crime by the US government, and while we don't to abandon people who are suffering now because of some theoretical future fix, we also don't want to normalize the idea that constitutional rights only exist when a private market accommodates them. That's explicitly a bad direction for the country to go.
- Saying "well, this works here and now, and people don't have access to anything better" is in my mind only a really effective argument when we know that the thing here and now actually works. But we don't know that this works, which changes a lot about the equation.
- Is sneaking an AI into a courtroom through an earpiece really a cost-effective accessible strategy for poor people? Nothing about this screams "accessibility" to me.
I think summing up the last two points, if the AI was proven to actually work in a court of law, and was an accessible option, then sure, at that point I think the argument would have a lot more weight. It wouldn't be ideal, it would be a bad state for us to be in because your constitutional rights should not depend on an AI. But I could see a strong argument for using the AI in the meantime.
But that doesn't mean that DoNotPay should do unethical things right now to get to that point. The way that your choice is being phrased is begging the question: it assumes that the AI is the only choice other than no representation, that it does work, and that it will produce better outcomes.
But we don't actually know if the AI does work in a court of law, and DoNotPay's decision was to "move fast and break things"; it was to start releasing it into the wild without knowing what would happen. We don't know if asking people to represent themselves with a secret earpiece is a good legal strategy or if it's accessible. We don't know what happens when something goes wrong. We don't know that this actually is a working solution. But they were putting someone's legal outcome on the line anyway.
I think there's a big difference between making an imperfect solution available to poor people because we don't have anything better to offer, and using poor people as experimental fodder to build an imperfect solution that might not work at all. There's a lot of assumption here that using their AI would be better than representing yourself, and I don't know that's true. A judge is not going to pleased with being used as an experiment. And I've been hearing people say that the AI subpoenaed the officer involved in the ticket? That's not a good legal strategy.
The proper way to build a solution like this is to make sure it works before you start using it on people, and I think it's unethical to give someone bad legal advice and to try and justify it because giving that person bad legal advice might allow the company to help other people down the line. A lot of our laws around legal representation are predicated on the idea that legal advice should be solely focused on the good of the client, and not focused on the lawyer's career, or on someone else the lawyer wants to help, or on what the lawyer will be able to do in the future. Based on what we know about the state of the AI today, it doesn't seem like DoNotPay was thinking solely about the good of the person they were advising. We really don't want the legal industry to be an industry that embraces "the ends justify the means."