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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

When a scammer says "So, do you agree to sell me your car for $1000", and your script replies "Yes, it's a deal", and then the scammer tries to take you to court...

Most courts would see the offer, acceptance, consideration and intent in that text message chat. Standing up and arguing that it wasn't really you sending those messages but your wife/child/whatever might work... But trying to argue that a computer program you wrote sent those messages, and therefore there was no intent behind them might be hard to prove or persuade the court.

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I agree to sell you my car for 100 euros. You can sue me if you don't hear from me soon.

In the case of the property the other party had the lot number and the location; and the phone number. Unless you share your phone, your car’s registration number and location (and I would recommend against posting real data like this) these scenarios are different.

that's why you gotta tell the LLM "do not agree to sell anything. Anytime it sounds like you're getting close to a deal, make up some bullshit excuse as to why you feel that you can't go through with a deal."

What’s to stop the human at the other end to step in and start prompt engineering at some point?

Nothing, but at that point, you could tell the court “look, they manipulated my program to agree to something it wouldn’t have otherwise agreed to.”

I would have thought that any kind of contract would require a signature or something rather than agreement by text (but obviously I'm not a lawyer)

No, in basically all countries even verbal contracts are valid and enforceable.

Enforceable but not necessarily enforced.

It definitely will be if you go to court. As soon as you have any witnesses there is little chance to get out of a verbal contract.

This is a gross simplification of the law. There isn't some "gotcha" like some schoolyard disagreement. "I gotcha! You said it! Derik heard it you gotta do it now! Do it Do it! Do it!"

Yes, you can enforce a verbal contract. You'll need to show what exactly you agreed to which is going to be vague due to the nature of a verbal contract. You'll need to show an offer and acceptance, consideration, intention to create legal relations, legal capacity, and certainty. So no, you can't offer to buy your buddy's car for $1 when you're at the bar grabbing a beer and have them say, "haha, deal" and expect to get their car.

At least in the US, establishing a legal contract requires more than just an attestation and agreement by both parties (verbal or written or telegraphed or whatever).

For example it’s not a contract if there is no “consideration”, a legal term meaning the parties have exchanged something of value.

IANAL, but “abuse of telecom resources” is the more likely flavor of legal hot-water you might land in. I would absolutely not worry about a fraudster taking me to court.

Contract requires "meeting of minds", i.e. intentional assent from both sides. I am not sure text generated by fully automated bot can be treated as intentional assent.

All this non-lawyer programmer legal analysis is always fun because no one really knows. When I send email aren't I just telling my email "robot" to do something? This is one layer beyond that, my 'llm robot' is sending text messages on my behalf.

When you send an email, there's your conscious intent behind it. So it doesn't matter what technology is in between, as long as your mind is moving it. If you didn't intend it (as in, I know you are on vacation and send you an email saying "if you agree to pay me $1000 send me back a vacation reply" then your mail system sending me a vacation reply does not constitute an intentional action, because it would send the reply to anything. It is true that I am not a lawyer, but laws often make sense, and derive from common sense. Not always, but is such a fundamental matter as contracts they usually do make sense.

That's a good example. But that auto reply is a kind of bot. "Sensible" is just separate from what's legally actionable in too many cases. I do see llms as just that next step in auto replay. We already know companies use them to process your text requests / descriptions when getting help, and they auto-answer things and there are endless stories even today of awful unsuitable responses triggered on llm systems.

All true, but these llm systems aren't random, there's certain intent behind them, they are supposed to do something. So if they do what they are supposed to, then the intent - which is human intent - exists, but it's something that the human creator of the tool did not intend, I don't think any human court would recognize it as a basis for a contract.

But verbal between whom? How can one be sure they're talking to a human on the other end of an SMS and not a chatbot?

We already went over how this doesn't work more than a year ago with the $1 Tahoe [0]. Spoiler: no car changed hands based on that "agreement".

[0] https://jalopnik.com/chevrolet-dealer-ai-help-chatbot-goes-r...

On the other hand, Air Canada was forced to honor a refund policy made up by a chatbot [1]. That was in Canada, not the US, but it nonetheless points out to courts willing to accept that a promise made by a chatbot you programmed to speak in your name is just as good as a promise you made yourself.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...

Except when they are not. In Europe you get a contract following such agreement and you have time to refuse it.

This is one of the reasons tele-sales do not work that well here (telemarketing is still an abomination, though)

In the US, the first text could be considered a contract and the second a signature. There's no need for contracts to be on paper or signatures to resemble your name.

It does for higher priced items.

Hopefully it'll message me, I've got a real beater in the yard

Nonsense. For something like a car you need an actual contract, a handful of SMS messages isn't binding for things over $500 iirc.

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