Technology
“AI Grandma” is happy to talk to phone scammers all day long
On Thursday, the UK’s largest mobile operator, O2, introduced a chatbot designed to thwart phone scammers. Called “dAIsy”, an imitation of an older woman with loads of time to chat – about knitting, her cat Fluffy – so as to always engage scammers in trying to get her (fake) bank details.
AND press release o O2’s “AI Granny” says it combines “different AI models” that transcribe a caller’s voice into text, then generate a response using a custom large language model, then feed it through a text-to-speech model to produce voice response. The artificial intelligence was partly trained by Jim Browninga “scam” expert with an enormous following on YouTube.
It’s nice to see this in practice. (O2 claims that the audio within the video below is real.) If it really works, even higher. Last yr, the FBI reported that folks over 60 were defrauded of $3.4 billion through wire scams, up from $3.1 billion in 2022. As artificial intelligence and voice impersonation develop into more widespread, these numbers will soon increase.