How an artificial granny can slow down real scam artists
“AIeeeeeee.” That’s what I feel like saying every time I see that particular abbreviation dotted across nearly every technology story that’s ever been published in the last year or so. Not just technology, it’s spreading into nearly every other sphere you can think of too.
I confess to feeling a frisson of mischievous glee when the DeepSeek news surfaced and created merry havoc, threatening to derail the constant effluvia of stories and hyperbole around AI. Coincidentally, “AIeeeeee” is probably what a lot of people were saying when the share prices of all the companies responsible for so much of that effluvia started plunging.
Amid all this upheaval, it was pleasing to see something about AI being put to good use in the greater cause of humanity in The Guardian a few days ago. The star of this story is someone called Daisy. For older readers, I would like to make clear that she is not the lady famed for being implored to answer in the affirmative based on the lure of a seat on a bicycle made for two.
This particular Daisy blazed a brief trail before fading into anonymity once again. An elderly grandmother of 78, as The Guardian reports, Daisy has a fondness for chatting about knitting patterns, recipes for scones and being generous in her offers of cups of tea. Armed with all of these attributes, Daisy has proven to be a highly effective weapon against scammers.
If you haven’t guessed already, Daisy is an AI bot created to waste the time of people trying to scam her. Some of us have employed our own particular tactics to annoy and frustrate scammers, such as asking them to hang on while we (don’t) restart the computer, while we’re (not) looking for our password or while we (don’t) answer the front door. Some of us may have even sought to annoy them by pretending to have a level of computer literacy that stretches barely beyond being able to turn it on and off.
But Daisy takes all that to another level. If she’s not looking for her glasses and then taking an age to turn her computer on and find the Explorer icon, she’s digressing into a chat about knitting patterns or scone recipes.
According to the report, Daisy was able to waste each fraudster’s time by up to 40 minutes, time that they could have been using to scam real people.
Pretty impressive, right? And what’s even more impressive is that this is an example of AI being used to increase the length of time something takes rather than accelerate it and decrease rather than enhance productivity.
Sadly, Daisy is not being rolled out on a wider scale. According to Virgin Media O2’s marketing director, Simon Valcarcel, the primary purpose of ‘AI granny’ Daisy’s project was to raise awareness.
I have to say that I enjoyed this story because there’s something reassuring about the phrase ‘AI granny’. Let’s face it, that’s not something likely to strike terror into the hearts of AI-sceptics.
Of course, when the day comes that the AI robots have cornered the last remnants of humanity in the post-apocalyptic wastelands, we might not feel quite as sanguine about it all when the final cry uttered by the last human to rend the toxic orange and black sky is “AIeeeeee.”
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