The wild thing isn’t that they ChatGPT’d license. That’s incompetent but forgivable, maybe even smart.
The move that dials the dumbassery to eleven is using it as a defence. On Twitter. Like, Exhibit A for any lawsuit that company is ever in will be this tweet: it demonstrates a proud disrespect for law and contracts. That’s high-proof mens rea if I’ve ever seen any.
Why is that forgivable? Any serious venture would have a involved, you know, some kind of legal expert to do a license. Getting that wrong at any stage has serious repercussions and can effectively end the whole project.
I was given three pieces of advice on starting up my own business and they were good:
Because legal naïvete is common and isn't a good predictor of founder ineptitude. Is it better to be legally savvy? Of course. But thinking you can wing it with a license agreement because it's boring and unfamiliar and you're rather focus on building your product is understandable. (In some cases, it might even be the right call.)
> Claiming legal naivete is acceptable and sometimes even commendable is probably the most irresponsible thing I've ever read on here
I'll stand by it. Most Americans are legally naïve. Most founders are, too. A start-up has to make trade-offs--it's far from clear such licensing agreements are make-or-break at the angel or seed stage.
Once that's pointed out to you, you hopefully either hire a lawyer or mitigate your legal cross section until you can afford one, e.g. by using template license agreements instead of rolling your own. But until you've been given that feedback, it's not some bizarre conclusion someone can come to. Most small businesses, for example, are formed perfectly well without much legal sophistication.
Template license agreements have been presumably written or reviewed by a contract lawyer somewhere along the line. I certainly wouldn't judge a founding team that chooses to use vetted legal templates - that's a reasonable choice early on when money is better spent on product than expensive lawyer hours.
However, using templates is a far cry from asking an LLM to write your agreement and assuming it won't hallucinate something that's going to put you in legal jeopardy.
> However, using templates is a far cry from asking an LLM to write your agreement and assuming it won't hallucinate something that's going to put you in legal jeopardy
Sure. Not disputing it isn’t incredibly stupid. But if, on having that pointed out, the founders had admitted it was a dumb thing to do—they had acted thoughtlessly and recognised as much—I’d be willing to forgive them the error. Hence, forgivable.
The move that dials the dumbassery to eleven is using it as a defence. On Twitter. Like, Exhibit A for any lawsuit that company is ever in will be this tweet: it demonstrates a proud disrespect for law and contracts. That’s high-proof mens rea if I’ve ever seen any.