Thanks, Grandma.
Grandma Design
UK telecom company Virgin Media O2 just revealed a fascinating AI entity: an audio chatbot that takes the persona of a confused grandmother, fine-tuned to do nothing except make phone scammers angry.
“As ‘Head of Scammer Relations,’ this state-of-the-art AI Granny’s mission is to talk with fraudsters and waste as much of their time as possible with human-like rambling,” Virgin Media wrote of the bot. “Created using a range of cutting-edge AI technology and trained with the help of one of YouTube’s best known scambaiters, Jim Browning, Daisy is a lifelike AI Granny completely indistinguishable from a real person.”
Daisy seems like the rare noble application of AI chatbots, which have more often been used to perpetrate scams than fight them — a clever reversal that just might help the vulnerable people, including flesh-and-blood grandmothers, on whom scammers tend to prey.
Phone Prone
To keep scammers occupied, Daisy — to which the company says it automatically connects likely scam callers — deploys confusing digressions about her family and love of knitting. When pressed for bank information, she’ll provide scammers with random numbers. She’s kept scammers on the line for as long as 40 minutes, O2 says.
“By tricking the criminals into thinking they were defrauding a real person and playing on scammers’ biases about older people, Daisy has prevented them from targeting real victims,” read the Virgin blog.
“But crucially, Daisy is also a reminder that no matter how persuasive someone on the other end of the phone may be, they aren’t always who you think they are,” Virgin fraud director Murray Mackenzie added.
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