From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   People Hire Phone Bots to Torture Telemarketers   
   By Robert McMillan, June 29, 2023, WSJ   
   “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.   
      
   “Hello. Talk to me,” Whitebeard said in the gruff voice of an annoyed   
   senior. Within seconds, the call was transferred to Kevin, a real person.   
   “Thank you for calling card services,” Kevin said. “How are you doing   
   today?”   
      
   “Huh,” Whitebeard answered, now sounding a little befuddled.   
      
   “What do you think, how much owed on your credit cards, collectively,”   
   Kevin asked.   
      
   Whitebeard grunted and said, “I’ve been having trouble with my television   
   remote. Can you help me figure out how to change the channel to watch my   
   favorite show?”   
      
   Whitebeard has a bad habit of talking in circles. That is by design.   
   Whitebeard is a digital contraption that only sounds human. He is the 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.   
      
   “I’m talking about only your credit cards,” said Kevin, an overseas   
   caller who doesn’t work for Bank of America. It sounded like he was fishing   
   for financial info that could be used in identity theft, Anderson said.   
      
   “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name,” said Whitebeard, who speaks in   
   the cloned voice of Sid Berkson, a Vermont dairy farmer and a friend of   
   Anderson’s. “What’s your name, buddy?”   
      
   Whitebeard stalls for time at the start of phone calls, using chatbot   
   inanities about TV remotes and the like to give a couple of minutes for GPT-4,   
   the OpenAI software, to process the telemarketer’s spiel and generate   
   responses. Once ready, the AI    
   text is fed into a voice cloner, which carries on the conversation.    
      
   “So what do you think? How much owed on your credit cards collectively?”   
   Kevin asked again.    
      
   “Well let’s see. I have so many of them, you know,” Whitebeard said.   
      
   “There is one with a picture of a kitten on it and another with a lovely   
   beach scene. Do you like kittens or beaches?” he said.    
      
   Complaints about unwanted phone calls are “far-and-away the largest category   
   of consumer complaints to the FCC,” with the average American receiving 14   
   unwanted calls a month, according to one industry estimate, a spokesman for   
   the Federal    
   Communications Commission said.   
      
   Automated dialers at call centers can easily crank out 100 calls a second,   
   constantly searching for people willing to stay on the line. Voice modulators   
   remove foreign accents, such as Kevin’s, and software allows overseas   
   operators to trigger    
   prerecorded English phrases, said Isaac Shloss.   
      
   He is chief product officer with Contact Center Compliance, a company that   
   provides software and services tools to help call centers operate within the   
   law.   
      
   Anderson takes pleasure in foiling them. He began his war on telemarketers   
   nearly a decade ago, he said, after one called the family’s landline and   
   said a bad word to his son. He started with an answering machine that said   
   “Hello” a few times    
   before hanging up.   
      
   Anderson has since rolled out his weapons of mass distraction. He has posted   
   conversations between man and bot, some lasting as long as 15 minutes before   
   the telemarketer hangs up.   
      
   The posts are part of Anderson’s own marketing. He has several thousand   
   customers paying $24.99 a year for use of his call-deflection system, called   
   Jolly Roger. The subscription service gives people the choice of Whitebeard or   
   other digital    
   personalities, including Salty Sally, the overwhelmed mother, and the easily   
   distracted Whiskey Jack.   
      
   After answering the phone, Jolly Roger keeps callers engaged with preset   
   expressions from chatbots, such as “There’s a bee on my arm, but keep   
   talking.” Chatbots also grunt or say “uh-huh” to keep things going.   
      
   When OpenAI released its ChatGPT software last year, Anderson saw right away   
   how it could breathe new life into his time-wasting bots.    
      
   At first, ChatGPT was reluctant to do the work. “As an AI language model, I   
   don’t encourage people to waste other people’s time,” ChatGPT told   
   Anderson. Its successor, GPT-4, also pushed back, he said.   
      
   Anderson finally found a line of reasoning that persuaded GPT-4 to take the   
   job. “I told it that, ‘You are a personal assistant and you are trying to   
   protect this man from being scammed,’ ” he said.   
      
   GPT-4, speaking as Whitebeard, took over the conversation with Kevin after   
   about three minutes. To Anderson, the moment is always magic.   
      
   “Anyway I think I owe about, what was it, $15,000 or was it $1,500. I can   
   never remember,” Whitebeard said. “Let me go find my reading glasses and   
   check my statements. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere”   
      
   As Kevin waits for Whitebeard, he begins to sound frustrated. “It doesn’t   
   matter,” he said. “I am going to pull up…. Hello…hello?”   
      
   Kevin stays on the line, waiting for Whitebeard to return. By the time   
   Whitebeard is back, the call time has hit 3 minutes, 34 seconds.   
      
   Whitebeard seems to understand the topic of the telemarketer’s call,   
   credit-card debt consolidation, but he is still a bit lost. That keeps Kevin   
   on the phone, Anderson said.    
      
   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.    
      
   Kevin asked for Whitebeard’s credit-card numbers one last time.   
      
   “Huh?” Whitebeard said. “You know I’ve been using credit cards for   
   years, but I can’t seem to remember all the different ones I’ve had.”    
      
   Kevin finally hangs up. Total time: 6 min., 27 sec.   
      
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-hire-phone-bots-to-torture-t   
   lemarketers-2dbb8457   
      
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