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Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

news.virginmediao2.co.uk

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Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#21

Post by barbazoo »

dmurray wrote: post #13

This is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as "Lemmy". When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy". And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't d…

Let's ignore the real problem and distract the plebs by building some cute AI tool instead.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#23

Post by xnx »

Seems like the logical endpoint of a lot of this is people getting paid directly for their attention. Want to call me? I've set a price of $5/call that I answer, and an additional $10/minute of listen time after the first 10 seconds. Want to send me an email? $1/email and $5/100 words. Anyone I have emailed is automatically on my allow-list, which I can also adjust manually.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#24

Post by arresin »

barbazoo wrote: post #21
dmurray wrote: post #13

This is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as "Lemmy". When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy". And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't d…

Let's ignore the real problem and distract the plebs by building some cute AI tool instead.

Would it help to know that

> Influencer and reality TV star, Amy Hart, has worked with Daisy to produce a shocking video to show how she’s taking on phoney fraudsters

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#25

Post by axus »

waiwai933 wrote: post #19
dmurray wrote: post #13

This is cool when some independent hacker / artist does it as "Lemmy". When a big telecom does it, the second thing they do with it is to fuck up the spam detection so bad that every third phone call I make gets answered by "Daisy". And just think about it - why would a telecom need this tech? They can already drop the spam calls and stop routing calls from the bad actor telecoms who enable the spammers. They don't d…

They're not intercepting calls over their network from suspected bad actors; rather, they've created some phone numbers that always go to Daisy - see https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/11/virgin-media-o...

Ah! So step 2 is wait for the spammers to automate blacklisting of Daisy phone numbers, and only then start rolling out a (paid) Daisy option to customers.

Not connecting calls doesn't waste spammer money, but maybe Daisy does.

If the big telco can find 10 righteous callers from a a bad actor telecom, they should keep routing the calls.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#26

Post by ttul »

axus wrote: post #25
waiwai933 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not intercepting calls over their network from suspected bad actors; rather, they've created some phone numbers that always go to Daisy - see https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/11/virgin-media-o...

Ah! So step 2 is wait for the spammers to automate blacklisting of Daisy phone numbers, and only then start rolling out a (paid) Daisy option to customers. Not connecting calls doesn't waste spammer money, but maybe Daisy does. If the big telco can find 10 righteous callers from a a bad actor telecom, they should keep routing the calls.

My friend works for a big telco and is the guy fixing this problem for them. They have amazing powers of deception when they need it. New numbers can be conjured up at any time.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#27

Post by huac »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #20

I'm imagining this is just a publicity stunt, and I'll say it's a very good one. However I can't see it being very practical. There are lots of scam calls to keep up with and LLMs and text-to-speech models are expensive to run. If they do run this in production, the costs of running hundreds of 'Daisies' will inevitably be passed onto the consumer, and worse still, if the scammers are calling in through PSTN lines or…

real-time full duplex like OpenAI GPT-4o is pretty expensive. cascaded approaches (usually about 800ms - 1 second delay) are slower and worse, but very very cheap. when I built this a year ago, I estimated the LLM + TTS + other serving costs to be less than the Twilio costs.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#29

Post by watusername »

If you use a VoIP service like Twilio and voip.ms, you can set up a very simple IVR menu that just asks unknown callers to press 1 to be connected to you. No AI involved.

For me, this has been surprisingly effective against robocalls. Obviously this isn’t going to work against scammers who call directly, but most of the spam calls I receive start with some pre-recorded message which isn’t going to pass the menu.

Edit: s/auto/pre

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#30

Post by AlwaysRock »

ynoxinul wrote: post #4

Reminded me of Lenny and he didn't even need any AI to waste a lot of scammers' time.

I remember setting up Lenny and forwarding calls I used to get to him while commuting on the bus early in my career. It was a lot of fun to listen to scammers start to freak out when they realized what was happening.
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