A new chatbot is programmed to keep phone scammers online and wasting their time!
Since its emergence at the end of 2022, generative AI has caused a lot of concern, in particular with the new tools it makes available to scammers. But technology can also be used to counter these same unscrupulous people.
Apate bait
What if the scammers who try to extort money from you over the phone finally found the superhero who was going to fight them effectively? This may be what researchers at Macquarie University in Sydney have managed to develop with their chatbot called “Apate”. Built from ChatGPT and voice cloning technology, this AI is able to reproduce real exchanges between a person and a scammer.
Indeed, Apate was trained from transcripts of exchanges with real scammers, which allows him to reproduce the reactions of human beings in these particular moments. The researchers’ goal is to waste time [aux escrocs] And [de] reduce the number of successful scams “. If they now had to spend long minutes on each call with an AI before finally leaving empty-handed, their “business model” could come out greatly weakened.
Soon 40 minutes of conversation?
The idea came to scientist Dali Kaafar after he received a call from a scammer and kept him on the phone for 40 minutes to drive him crazy. ” I then started thinking about how we could automate the whole process and use natural language processing to develop a computerized chatbot that could have a believable conversation with the scammer. “, he explained.
At the moment, Apate manages to hold conversations with the scammers that last an average of 5 minutes. But the researchers are much more ambitious and want to reach an average discussion of 40 minutes. The optimism is also very present. ” We found that the bots reacted quite well to some sticky situations that we didn’t think we could solve, with scammers asking for information that we didn’t train the bots for, but the bots adapt and give very believable answers “, details Dali Kaafar. We are in a hurry to know the final result in a few months!
Source : PCMag
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