We may have found the killer app for AI. Well, actually, British telecom provider O2 has. As The Guardian reports, they have an AI chatbot that acts like a 78-year-old grandmother and receives phone calls. Of course, since the grandmother—Daisy, by name—doesn’t get any real phone calls, anyone calling that number is probably a scammer. Daisy’s specialty? Keeping them tied up on the phone.
While this might just seem like a prank for revenge, it is actually more than that. Scamming people is a numbers game. Most people won’t bite. So, to be successful, scammers have to make lots of calls. Daisy can keep one tied up for around 40 minutes or more.
You can see some of Daisy’s antics in the video below. Or listen to Daisy do her thing in the second video. When a bogus tech support agent tried to direct Daisy to the Play Store, she replied, “Did you say pastry?” Some of them became quite flustered. She even has her own homepage.
While we have mixed feelings about some AI applications, this is one we think everyone can get onboard with. Well, everyone but the scammers.
It might not do voice, but you can play with local AI models easily now. Spoofing scammers is the perfect job for the worst summer intern ever.
Hello, this is Lenny!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWrkDOt_IfM
(Alles kommt zurück, auch Hosen mit Schlag.)
… and while “Daisy” is keeping the scammer occupied, presumably every effort is being made to trace the origin of the call, the callers likely nationality, use sophisticated analysis of the signal return delay in the call, probe the caller subtly for information…. surely we can build this in to pretty sticky honeypot trap.
If YouTube is to be believed scambaiters can do all that and then some. At times you can even hear the din in the call center.
They even manage to geolocate the scam call centers street & number.
And the authorities in a certain sub-continent happily turn a blind eye, even when supposedly raiding a call centre they all get off scott free and are back in business before you know it.
Soon Spammer AI calling Daisy.
A sacrificial spammer AI could intentionally call Daisy and keep her phone line tied up. Other scammer AIs will then get a busy signal and go to the next number.
Yeah, you could put Daisy’s number in a list of numbers to skip. But what fun would that be?
I get calls like this all the time. Sometime, I answer just to do what this nice bit of AI does. Once, I got a very convincing call that after about 5 minutes turned out to be a very good bot. I strung it along until it was about to give up, and then said “I’m interested, tell me more.” I kept it on the line for an hour with minimal effort — just doing my part as user friendly liveware.
469eater all over again.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Real A**holes, now this I like!
Let me ruin this well intention project
What’s the carbon footprint of keeping these running?
No idea, maybe better ask ChtGPT that.
(Gretta has left the chat).
How many resources could babbling platitudes take anyway?
Who falls for that oil company “You’re killing the planet by existing” crap these days?
Why is it you can use more power than our whole town to generate bitcoin (that is just one such operation I know about) or same with generating babble (what is called ai) for people to consume — with no consequences, yet nit-pick on what we drive down the street? Or what we heat our houses with? Is something out of whack here or is it just me?
How about we politely ask those third world countries to deal with their telephone scammers issue instead. Those calls are not made by few neckbeards living in basements (like PrankNET) but are well organized operations employing many people.
If those countries are unable or unwilling to do so, let’s just drop all their incoming calls and messages. If they continue their cyber crime activity by telling naive people to call them, then drop both incoming and outgoing calls to their countries.
We could start by having our telecom giants dropping calls from untrustworthy sources… Yes, that would interrupt lots of legitimate phone calls, but that pain would encourage the companies into cleaning things up
Go back to having an operator between us and international calls. Just like back in the o’ days. Screen the calls as they come in. Then the caller is billed for the call regardless. That would stop a lot of nonsense.
Hank Greene did a video on this very subject, and I don’t think he was aware of Daisy.
If this sort of AI becomes more prevalent, his thesis was that it could eventually tip the scales to where scammers find that direct cold calling is no longer profitable. Fingers crossed!
They’ll be deploying AI scammers soon. With a/b testing to improve the AI each iteration.
The future is the dead internet. AI spambots are our descendants that will inherit the universe.
Would explain the Fermi Paradox.
Its a little bit scary train an AI to retain a conversation as long as possible with a human, cause they are perfectly capable to do it. Not to say to stay to watch just another video. Today they target the scammers but soon they will use AI to offer you a new product or service.
In Europe there is a regulation that prohibits such use case, even is against an scammer, cause its really “dangerous”.
The scammers can use AI too, the problem is the pricing, but if an AI success rate is much higher, it can be rentable.
Will be much fun the this AI talks to the scammers that she needs some money to get all the funds of a lotery ticket…
Kit Bodega did a fantastic one on youtube a while ago where after taking them in circles for a bit pretending to be a little old lady he then pretended to fluff the payment up and sent them into an unwinnable customer service maze he’d setup. Motivated by the possibility that ill gotten gains awaited them they wasted far more time than the initial scam call itself, pure genius. Would love to see Daisy paired with that.