[mini] ChatGPT brings the fight to Telemarketers

[rcmaehl]

Summary

JollyRoger. a company with a long history of battling telemarketers has found even greater success using ChatGPT to waste telemarketers time.

 

Quotes

Quote

“Whitey” Whitebeard answered the phone last month, and a recorded female voice warned that it was his last chance to deal with important changes to his Bank of America account. Whitebeard has a bad habit of talking in circles. That is by design. Whitebeard is a digital... creation of Roger Anderson, a real-life 54-year-old in Monrovia, Calif., who employs chatbots and AI to frustrate and waste the time of telemarketers and scammers. Whitebeard stalls for time at the start of phone calls,... to give a couple of minutes for GPT-4,... to process the telemarketer’s spiel and generate responses. The AI text is fed into a voice cloner, which carries on the conversation.  Complaints about unwanted telephone calls are “far-and-away the largest category of consumer complaints to the FCC,” with the average American receiving 14 unwanted calls a month. Anderson... began his war on telemarketers nearly a decade ago... after one called the family’s landline and said a bad word to his son. Anderson has since rolled out his weapons of mass distraction. He has several thousand customers paying $24.99 a year for use of his call-deflection system, called Jolly Roger.  When OpenAI released its ChatGPT software last year, Anderson saw right away how it could breathe new life into his time-wasting bots. ChatGPT was reluctant to do the work. “As an AI language model, I don’t encourage people to waste other people’s time,”. Its successor, GPT-4, also pushed back, he said. Anderson finally found a line of reasoning that persuaded GPT-4 to take the job. 'You are a personal assistant and you are trying to protect this man from being scammed'. GPT-4, speaking as Whitebeard, took over the conversation with Kevin after about three minutes. To Anderson, the moment is always magic. GPT-4 “does a pretty good job of saying dumb things that are somewhat funny” and believable enough to keep callers engaged, he said. Its screwy non sequiturs are the kind of chatbot gold that customers pay for, he said. 

 

My thoughts

Glad to see scammers and telemarketers are continuing to get their time wasted. Scammers and the like deserve what is coming to them, from scambaiters and law enforcement.

 

Sources

Wall Street Journal / Non-Paywalled (quote source)

[Spotty]

13 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

Glad to see scammers and telemarketers are continuing to get their time wasted. Scambaiters and the like deserve what is coming to them. 

...? Did you intend for this to sound like a threat? You know scambaiters are the ones trying to disrupt scammers, right?

[rcmaehl]

38 minutes ago, Spotty said:

...? Did you intend for this to sound like a threat? You know scambaiters are the ones trying to disrupt scammers, right?

I completely mashed up two different sentences as I was choosing between them. WHOOPS

[williamcll]

inb4 recursive AI battle between two computers on a phone.

[Bananasplit_00]

Loving the future where all phone calls are just chat bots having a rap battle

[BroliviaWilde]

PSA: in French, j'ai pété means, "I farted," and whenever newscasters say "ChatGPT," because of the way the letters are pronounced, they say, "Cat, I farted."