london
CNN
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At first glance, Daisy looks like a typical grandmother. She loves knitting, talking about her family, has a cat named Fluffy, but is technically incompetent and has a lot of time to blow in the wind.
But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that she has extraordinary technical ability and has some cunning tricks up her sleeve.
That’s because Daisy is a conversational artificial intelligence chatbot created by British mobile phone company O2 to help fight fraud by fooling phone scammers into thinking they’re talking to a real human.
Her debut earlier this month highlighted how AI is being used both positively and negatively when it comes to online fraud.
Consumers around the world lost more than $1 trillion to online fraud last year, according to the lobbying group Global Anti-Scam Alliance. In a March report, the FBI announced that the FBI reported that losses from online fraud will reach a record $12.5 billion in 2023. But the U.S. federal government also praised the technology as “transformative” in helping the Treasury Department recover $1 billion worth of check fraud in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
According to O2, Daisy’s mission is to “converse with scammers, waste as much of their time as possible with human-like ramblings, and steer them away from real people.” In a statement announcing Daisy earlier this month, the company said her tactics “kept numerous scammers on the phone for 40 minutes at a time.”
Murray McKenzie, director of fraud at Virgin Media O2, said: “We are urging everyone to remain vigilant as fraudsters operate full-time call centers specifically targeting British people. did.
Last year, wider telecommunications group Virgin Media O2 stopped more than £250m ($315m) worth of fraudulent transactions, the equivalent of stopping one every two minutes. The company claims that.
Click to watch Daisy, the “AI Grandma,” fight against scammers.
Using a custom large-scale language model, Daisy is able to conduct autonomous conversations with scam callers in real time. Although she does not intercept calls, she does have multiple phone numbers of her own that O2 worked to circulate online.
Daisy’s voice, developed in partnership with London advertising agency VCCP, is modeled after a staff member’s grandmother.
In a separate statement, the agency said: “While anyone can become a victim of fraud, criminal fraud rings often target the elderly, so they often use the fraudsters’ own biases to target VCCP officials. “We created an AI grandma based on real relatives.”
“During the hours-long fraudulent call, she told rambling stories about her family, spoke at length about her passion for knitting, and provided false personal information, including fabricated bank account information.”
According to Virgin Media O2, Daisy was developed in response to research showing that the number one reason British citizens don’t fall for scammers is not wanting to waste their time.
Daisy, on the other hand, “has all the time in the world.”
In fact, she has so much time on her hands that in the video revealing her character, one con artist can be heard exasperatingly shouting, “It’s almost an hour!” By phone.
Another scammer told her: “I think your profession bothers people.”
What was her reaction? “I’m thinking of having a little talk.”
