Chatbot That Helped Beat $4 Million In Bogus Parking Tickets Now Handling Asylum Applications

from the small-solutions-for-larger-problems dept

Last year, 19-year-old UK student Josh Browder released a chatbot called "DoNotPay" that assisted drivers in challenging parking tickets. It was a small program with a huge upside. The bot's legal guidance -- in the form of yes/no questions -- resulted in more than $4 million in tickets being dismissed.

Chatbots are no replacement for lawyers, but almost no one seeks legal help when dealing with parking tickets. That's probably why law/traffic enforcement agencies feel comfortable issuing so many bogus ones. DoNotPay not only saved UK residents millions of dollars, it also proved the ticketing system was fundamentally broken. More than 64% of the 250,000 tickets challenged were overturned.

Browder was hoping to apply his chatbot AI to other legal issues -- narrowly-focused areas where legal help might be appreciated, but without the chance of severely screwing up someone's life if the chatbot led someone down the wrong path.

Browder’s next challenge for the AI lawyer is helping people with flight delay compensation, as well as helping the HIV positive understand their rights and acting as a guide for refugees navigating foreign legal systems.

It's the last one on the list receiving attention this year. Immigration law is an incredibly-dense legal thicket where wrong moves can mean finding yourself stranded in a country that doesn't want you or forcibly returned to the country you've been trying to leave. Brower's chatbot -- running through Facebook messenger this time -- isn't going to put immigrants in awkward positions, though. Instead, it's much more in line with DoNotPay: something that provides helpful assistance to make an often-confusing experience easier to tackle, but without the potential downside of someone wishing they'd spoken to an actual lawyer instead.

The chatbot works by asking the user a series of questions, in order to determine which application the refugee needs to fill out and whether a refugee is eligible for asylum protection under international law.

After this, it takes down the necessary details required for the appropriate asylum application – an I-589 for the United States or a Canadian Asylum Application for Canada. Those in the UK are told they need to apply in person, and the bot helps fill out an ASF1 form for asylum support.

If the program fails, nothing is made worse. The person seeking asylum is still stuck in the country they're trying to leave, but they're not sitting in a customs holding cell awaiting deportation. (At least, one hopes not. The best case scenario would be to apply for asylum before arriving, rather than after.)

Browder is also doing everything he can to protect users. The information obtained to autofill applications is only stored long enough to be transferred and deleted within 10 minutes of the app's use. The chatbot can also put users in touch with legal representation if requested.

This bot's success will be much more difficult to enumerate, but it's building on Browder's past successes. Since the debut of DoNotPay, Browder's legal assistance bots have helped UK citizens obtain reimbursement for delayed planes/trains and helped homeless individuals seek emergency housing.

Filed Under: ai, asylum applications, donotpay, josh browder, parking tickets, robolawyer, robot lawyer

Chatbot Helps Drivers Appeal Over $4 Million In Bogus Parking Tickets

from the the-revolution-will-be-automated dept

In what is likely a sign of the coming government-rent-seeking apocalypse, a 19-year-old Stanford student from the UK has created a bot that assists users in challenging parking tickets. The inevitable result of parking nearly anywhere can now be handled with something other than a) meekly paying the fine or b) throwing them away until a bench warrant is issued.

While a variety of bots have been created to handle a variety of tasks, very few have handled them quite as well as Joshua Browder's "robot lawyer" -- which is certain to draw some attention from disgruntled government agencies who are seeing this revenue stream drying up.

In the 21 months since the free service was launched in London and now New York, Browder says DoNotPay has taken on 250,000 cases and won 160,000, giving it a success rate of 64% appealing over $4m of parking tickets.

Fighting parking tickets is a good place to start, considering most people aren't looking to retain representation when faced with questionable tickets. The route to a successful challenge isn't always straightforward, so it's obviously beneficial to have some guidance in this area -- especially guidance that can determine from a set of pre-generated questions where the flaw in the issued ticket might lie.

Anyone looking for an expansion of chatbots into trickier areas of criminal law are probably going to need to rein in their enthusiasm. There's not much at stake individually in challenging a traffic ticket. The 36% who haven't seen a successful appeal are no worse off than they were in the first place. But it's still better than simply assuming that paying the fine is the only option, especially when the ticket appears to be bogus.

Browder has plans for similar bot-based legal guidance in the future.

Browder’s next challenge for the AI lawyer is helping people with flight delay compensation, as well as helping the HIV positive understand their rights and acting as a guide for refugees navigating foreign legal systems.

The fight against airlines should prove interesting. Generally speaking, most airlines aren't willing to exchange their money for people's time, especially when the situation creating the delay is out of their hands -- which seems to be every situation, whether it's a snowstorm or a passenger confusing math with terrorism. But, if it proves as successful as Browder's first AI assistant, more grumbling from those whose business model has just been interfered with is on the way.

Filed Under: ai, chatbot, joshua browder, machine learning, parking tickets, robot lawyer