Daisy Harris sounds like a phone scammer's dream target. But as Daisy herself says, she is, in reality, their "worst nightmare." Daisy, as it turns out, isn't real, explains CNN. She's a figment of artificial intelligence created by the British mobile phone company O2. The sole purpose of this chatbot's existence is to answer the calls of scammers, come off as a technically bumbling senior citizen, and waste as much of their time as possible in rambling conversation. "I drew a lot from my gran," Ben Hopkins, who worked on the project, tells the New York Times. "She always went on about the birds in her garden."
The tech team trained Daisy by bringing in an employee's grandmother for tea and recording hours of conversation. In a news release, the company says Daisy has wasted up to 40 minutes of scammers' time in various calls. Actual humans have delighted in pulling off the same trick, but Daisy's advantage is that she can take call after call after call. The company says it has worked to get various phone numbers answered by Daisy into scammers' circulation, but the Times notes she can only make a tiny, if satisfying, dent in the problem. "Although it does disrupt operations on a practical level, it doesn't stop fraud more broadly in any meaningful sense," says Elisabeth Carter, an associate professor of criminology and a forensic linguist at Kingston University London. (More scam stories.)
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