🤖 Grief tech, A.I. lawsuits, and the economic implications of ChatGPT

Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!

Here's what we have for you today:

• A.I. legal service DoNotPay faces lawsuit

• The rise of grief tech

• The economic impacts of ChatGPT

A.I. tool faces lawsuit

Welcome to the future, where not even robots are safe from lawsuits.

Legal service DoNotPay, which uses A.I. to provide cost-effective legal services, is now facing a class action lawsuit filed by Chicago-based law firm Edelson.

And the basis of the lawsuit?

The fact that the A.I. powering the service does not have a law degree.

"Unfortunately for its customers, DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm. DoNotPay does not have a law degree, is not barred in any jurisdiction, and is not supervised by any lawyer,” states the suit.

And while the alleged origins of the lawsuit stem from a customer that was diassastisfied with the service, in reality the lawsuit is the brainchild of Jay Edelson, a lawyer that specializes in class action lawsuits targeting tech companies in the U.S.

Edelson has successfully sued Google, Amazon, and Apple for billions, and has recently been running Facebook ads targeting DoNotPay customers in the hopes of finding a basis to sue the company.

Joshua Browder (CEO of DoNotPay) fired back at Edelson, calling the lawsuit “meritless” and claiming that he was "not going to be bullied by America's richest class action lawyer."

On a recent Twitter thread Browder even explained that Edelson was part of the inspiration for starting DoNotPay, stating that Edelson “symbolizes everything wrong with the law”

He then went on to highlight a recent class action lawsuit that Edelson was behind to highlight his point, where the average victims received $345, whereas Edelson received $97.5 million dollars for fighting the case.

Browder said that he plans to use his A.I. legal services to help fight the case, so it’ll definitely be interesting to see how this shakes out.

You can check out Browder’s full response on Twitter here.

The rise of grief-tech

After learning that his father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, James Vlahos knew the time he had left with his father was limited.

Vlahos rushed to gather as many memories about his fathers life that he could, working together to record his entire life story and assembling all of the information into over 200 pages of notes.

"It was a great, but inert resource, and I longed for something interactive. So I spent nearly a year programming a chatbot replica of my father,'" said Vlahos.

Vlahos found the digital version of his late father to be very comforting, leading him to launch HereAfter, a company that allows you to create digital avatars of loved ones in order to preserve their memories.

The app works by prompting users to share information about their lives, often uncovering details and stories that you may have never thought to ask loved ones about.

"Its ability to draw families closer together, or expose information that doesn’t come up in day-to-day conversation, can be very meaningful and gratifying to people".

And while Vlahos’s project provides a basic example of how technology can be used to preserve the memories of loved ones, new A.I. tech has come out in the past week that will take a service like this to a whole other level.

By combining the latest developments in large language models with tools like D-ID’s new avatar technology, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be able to have a facetime conversation with a photo-realistic re-creation of a loved one that has passed away.

And while having an avatar of a lost loved one may help during the grieving process, not everyone thinks that this is a great idea, as Kirsten Smith, Clinical Research fellow at the University of Oxford, explains:

"Proximity seeking behaviors may block someone forging a new identity without the deceased person or prevent them from making new meaningful relationships. It might also be a way of avoiding the reality that the person has died - a key factor in adapting to the loss," she said.

Vlahos thinks that those types of concerns are unwarranted, however, believing that this type of technology will help to preserve memories of our loved ones that would otherwise be forgotten.

"I don’t think moving on should mean you have to forget someone or let your memories of that person become very faded and dull. So, if there’s a means to have much more rich, present, high fidelity memories of someone, I think that’s a good thing," Vlahos said.

Boosting productivity with ChatGPT

While countless people have begun using ChatGPT to get their work done faster, a recent MIT study was conducted in order to understand exactly how significant of an impact the tool has on worker productivity.

The study focused on mid-level professional writing tasks, finding (to no ones surprise) that using ChatGPT decreased the time required to complete a task while simultaneously improving the quality of the output.

Yet the more interesting aspect of the study was that the mass adoption of tools like ChatGPT may help reduce inequality in the workforce, as so-called “low-ability workers” benefited significantly more than high-ability workers when using the tool.

“If ChatGPT is especially helpful to those with poor writing and communication skills, it could have major labor market implications by expanding the available occupational choices and raise the earnings of individuals with strong idea-generation skills who struggle to effectively get those ideas onto paper.”

You can check out the full study here.

And now your moment of zen

That’s all for today folks!

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