“Human-like AIs have brought plenty of justifiable concerns about their ability to replace human workers, but a company is turning the tech against one of humanity’s biggest scourges: phone scammers. The AI imitates the criminals’ most popular target, a senior citizen, who keeps the fraudsters on the phone as long as possible in conversations that go nowhere, à la Grandpa Simpson.” (Techspot, 14 November 2024) This is reported by Techspot in an article from November 14, 2024. In this case, an AI grandmother is sicced on the fraudsters. “The creation of O2, the UK’s largest mobile network operator, Daisy, or dAIsy, is an AI created to trick scammers into thinking they are talking to a real grandmother who likes to ramble. If and when the AI does hand over the demanded bank details, it reads out fake numbers and names.” (Techspot, 14 November 2024) Daisy works by listening to a caller and transcribing his or her voice to text. Responses are generated by a large language model (LLM), complete with character personality layer, and then fed back through a custom AI text-to-speech model to generate a voice response. All this happens in real time, as the magazine reports. As phone scammers use more and more AI in their calls, you will soon find AI systems trying to outsmart each other.
BY OLIVER BENDEL
