Anyone who says they’re not worried about the future right now isn’t telling the truth. But while we’re all worried about the health implications of the COVID-19 coronavirus, for many the economic ramifications run an extremely close second. Especially for those without savings, or those in low-paid gig economy jobs, anxieties about how to pay the next bill are pretty darn scary. Even if it’s a type of scary that no Hollywood pandemic movie is ever going to touch.
Give a round of applause, then, to Joshua Browder: The 24-year-old legal-tech whiz kid behind DoNotPay, a growing arsenal of free automated A.I. tools that everyday consumers can use to do everything from disputing parking tickets to suing robocall scammers. His latest creation is tailor-made for those fretting about the impact that the coronavirus crisis is going to have on their ability to pay the next time they face demands.
The new DoNotPay service first identifies all the bills where the user can qualify for an extension and waiver of late fees. It can do this with the majority of payment demands, including rent, credit card, and utility bills. It will then automatically first reach out to the relevant company and make a “compassionate and polite” request. The average extension granted is two weeks. So far, so good. However, if the company denies a request, it then triggers a second legal request, drawing on local and state laws to ensure the request is granted and the company is not able to retaliate for the payment being late.
“It is relying on a combination of both new and existing rules,” Browder told Digital Trends. “For example, for states that don’t have specific COVID-19 protections, it will use long-standing rental laws to challenge unreasonable fees. It will then bolster these existing rules with the new measures, such as the executive order in the state of California. Finally, it will even use city laws to cement the case, including the upcoming proposal in New York City to allow people to use their security deposit toward rent. There are so many laws to protect people, but unfortunately the average person doesn’t know how it applies to them.”
Browder said that, compared to previous DoNotPay projects, getting this tool out to the public was considered much more urgent. “After we finished it, we then immediately began testing and secured extensions for all of our test users, [which numbered] about a dozen,” he said. “We were rushing to get this out before April 1, because we know that tens of millions won’t be able to make that deadline.”
The service is available via both the DoNotPay app and website. Right now, it only covers the U.S., though.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.