At first glance, Daisy looks like your stereotypical grandmother: She loves knitting and talking about her family, has a cat named Fluffy, is technologically inept and has plenty of time to shoot the breeze.
But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find her to be exceptionally tech-enabled, with a few cunning tricks up her sleeve.
That’s because Daisy is a conversational artificial intelligence chatbot created by British mobile phone company O2 to help combat fraud by tricking phone scammers into thinking they are speaking to a real person.
Her debut earlier this month highlights how AI is being used both positively and negatively when it comes to online scams.
According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a lobby group, consumers worldwide lost more than $1 trillion to online scams last year. A record $12.5 billion in losses from online scams was reported to the FBI in 2023, the bureau said in a report in March.
Daisy’s mission, according to O2, “is to talk with fraudsters and waste as much of their time as possible with human-like rambling chat to keep them away from real people.” Her tactics have kept “numerous fraudsters on calls for 40 minutes at a time,” the company said in a statement unveiling Daisy earlier this month.
“With scammers operating fulltime call centres specifically to target Brits, we’re urging everyone to remain vigilant,” commented Murray Mackenzie, Virgin Media O2’s director of fraud.
Last year, Virgin Media O2, the wider telecommunications group, blocked more than £250 million ($315 million) in suspected fraudulent transactions, which they say is equivalent to stopping one every two minutes.
Using a custom large language model, Daisy can hold autonomous conversations with scam callers in real time. While she does not intercept any calls, she has multiple phone numbers of her own that O2 has worked to get into circulation online.
Developed in partnership with London advertising agency VCCP, Daisy’s voice was modeled on a staff member’s grandmother.
“Whilst anyone can be a victim of a scam, criminal fraud gangs often target the elderly so we leaned into scammers’ own biases to create an AI granny based on a real relative of a VCCP employee,” the agency said in a separate statement.
“Over the course of many hours of scam calls she’s told meandering stories of her family, talked at length about her passion for knitting and provided false personal information including made-up bank details.”
According to Virgin Media O2, Daisy was developed in response to research revealing that not wanting to waste their own time ranked as the top reason why the British public wouldn’t bait scammers themselves.
Daisy, meanwhile, has “all the time in the world.”
In fact, she has so much time on her hands that in the video unveiling her character one exasperated scammer can be heard yelling, “It’s nearly been an hour!” over the phone.
Another fraudster tells her: “I think your profession is bothering people.”
Her response? “I’m just trying to have a little chat.”
