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Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

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101–110 of 277 posts

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#101

This reminds me of Dead Internet Theory. We have a phone network of AI scammers endlessly calling AI counter scammers. What a time to be alive.

Boy howdy, wait until you hear how rural phone companies make money.

There is one simple and easy solution to this mess, but good luck getting traction on it.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#103

Of course, the scammers have created their own AI to call people and scam them so it's just playing catchup. It's like corporate avatars for hiring or cold call bots for sales. I'd say stick to white listed numbers, but pro phones can't do that, and they are the most prone to spam.

I always ask the robocalls to say something specific.

It finally worked the other day! A robot repeated "chrysanthemum" back to me when asked. Sadly it seemed to be limited to this one single trick; as I continued my attempts to exploit it, it abruptly apologized and ended the call.

Cute, but one day I am going to get lucky and a scammer is going to get absolutely wrecked.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#104
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have already sorted the world between people you want to take calls from and people you don't, why wouldn't you just block the people you don't want instead of charging them money?

Because there's a middle ground of people who we have not yet categorized. I don't know every phone number my doctor might call me from.

And you think your doctor would be willing to pay for the privledge of talking to you?

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#105
post #27

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.

which is why we need to adopt nuclear power so we run thousands of these so the odds of them picking up a bot instead of a person is overwhelmingly likely

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#106

So it's just an AI re-implementation of the Telecrapper 2000 [1]? The original site is down but there are plenty of YouTube videos [2] of it still available. [1] https://hackaday.com/2005/09/08/telecrapper-2000/ [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK_zHisT_A

That's pretty hilarious. Amazing what you can do with just a well-crafted pre-recorded script.

There are some other Youtube videos where a guy writes these ChatGPT personalities, but those aren't as entertaining because the AI is basically just blurting out random thoughts rather than engaging in an actual conversation.

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#107

Good on them! > and one in five (22%) experiencing a fraud attempt every single week That seems low. I guess they mean phone calls only. I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spam mails a day (and these are the ones that made it past the first line defense). I also get 10 or more scam texts. Some of the phising emails that I get, are frighteningly realistic (but invariably seem to have at least one speling eror in…

> I get -no exaggeration- several hundred spam mails a day

I've seen no legit spam e-mail in years, on my very old, very used, "forums and other logins I don't care about", 2005 gmail address. What provider are you using?

Re: Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time

#109
post #65
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have already sorted the world between people you want to take calls from and people you don't, why wouldn't you just block the people you don't want instead of charging them money?

My attention is valuable. I should be able to sell it on my terms.

Is it though? Like it might be valuable to you, but i doubt its valuable to anyone else in a phone call situation and both parties need to find value to make a sale.

Like if you are interested in the convo then you should be paying the other person as you are getting value from the convo.

What's the situation where you don't care about the convo but for the right price you could care, and the other party also thinks that price is reasonable? Like maybe if someone is trying to recruit you i guess, but the situations where that is true seem very few and far between (and we already have a system for that, where traditionally someone offers to buy you a meal in exchange for listening)

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