[Associated Press reporter Mustakim Hasnath talking with Daisy, an AI chatbot, using a laptop]
[Daisy’ and her fictional husband]
[AI generated voiced animation of ‘Daisy’]
[AI generated animation of ‘Daisy’ on call with a real scammer]
[AI generated animation of ‘Daisy’ on a phone call with a real scammer]
[AI generated animation of ‘Daisy’ on a phone call with a real scammer]
[AI generated voiced animation of ‘Daisy’ ]
[AI generated voiced animation of ‘Daisy’ on an AI generated computer screen]
[Interiors of creative agency CVVP and Virgin Media’s central London offices]
Simon Valcarcel (interview): “The reason why we used AI is because it doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t eat, you can use it 24 hours a day, it’s a great use case to demonstrate some of these tactics that the scammers do to keep them on the line, and the great thing about AI is that when it’s talking to AI it’s not talking to real people and scamming them out of their hard earned money.”
[Interiors of creative agency’s VCCP’s office]
[Joint creative director who helped developed ‘Daisy’, Morten Legarth, working at desk]
Morten Legarth (interview): “So how it works is when we get a call, we use a bunch of different AI models, so the first model that we’re using is a voice recognition model so obviously it needs to understand every word that the scammers said. Those words are then streamed into a language model. That language model will be able to understand what the scammers are saying, and it will then reference a knowledge base we have with a lot of information about how scams work, and it will then use a part of the model (that) has Daisy’s personality built into it. It will then use Daisy’s personality to formulate a response, and that response then gets outputted as text. The text will then go into a voice model which then adds all the way that Daisy speaks, her mannerisms, all those sort of things.”
[Joint creative director who helped developed ‘Daisy’, Morten Legarth working at desk]
[The generative AI algorithm coding used to run ‘Daisy’]
Ben Hopkins (interview): “We think there’s loads of legs in the old girl yet. We’ve got lots of plans. I mean we’ve written all of these different scenarios for her to focus on things, like the different types of birds that land in her garden, or the fact that she plays for the Malmesbury players and is going to be in ‘The Pirates of Penzance’, stuff like that, so there’s a whole wealth of opportunity there. And then beyond Daisy, we have other characters from other backgrounds all standing by in the wings waiting to do the good work.”
[Interiors of creative agency VCCP’s central London offices]
Colin Rigby (interview): “Whilst more exposing, we’re also burning up huge amounts of resources in terms of the use of AI and therefore the sustainability of AI and so on, but also we need to consider the potential for an AI arms race where the people who are scamming and being baited are using AI to scam, and you end up with two AIs essentially learning about each other and at war with one another. And that potentially could happen and the amount of resources that would burn through and the sophistication of the scams that would come from an arms race of that nature would be quite extraordinary.”
[AI generated photo of ‘Daisy’ in VCCP’s offices]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.