California Man Makes AI Chatbot to Mess with Telemarketers

• Roger Anderson, the creator of Jolly Roger, has developed an AI-powered chatbot to frustrate telemarketers and scammers.
• One chatbot named “Whitey” Whitebeard successfully engaged a telemarketer for over 6 minutes with humorous responses.
• ChatGPT powers the chatbot.
• The chatbot can answer questions, provide information, and engage in small talk.
• The chatbot is available as a subscription service for $25 per year.

Check out this story from California! So, there’s this guy named Roger Anderson who came up with a clever way to deal with those annoying telemarketers. Instead of just ignoring their calls or hanging up on them, he decided to use an AI chatbot to mess with them. How cool is that?

Roger runs a subscription service called Jolly Roger, and he’s got thousands of customers who pay him around $25 a year to use his brilliant creation. He calls it a “mass distraction,” and boy, does it do the trick! The idea is to keep the telemarketers and scammers on the line, frustrating them and wasting their precious time, all for trying to waste yours.

But here’s the best part: the heavy lifting is done by artificial intelligence. Roger’s chatbots, powered by ChatGPT, use a combination of preset expressions and topic-specific responses. And get this—they even go through a voice cloner, so the telemarketer on the other end thinks they’re talking to a real person. Talk about pulling the wool over their eyes!

According to a story in The Wall Street Journal, one of Roger’s chatbots named “Whitey” Whitebeard had an interesting encounter. It all started with a recorded female voice warning about a Bank of America account. When Whitebeard responded, the telemarketer call got transferred to an actual human who tried to engage the chatbot in a conversation about credit card consolidation.

Now, this is where it gets fun. Instead of giving any serious answers, Whitebeard just went full-on goofy. The caller seemed to be fishing for financial information that could be used for identity theft, but all they got were ridiculous responses. When asked about Whitebeard’s credit card debt, the chatbot replied with a hilarious description of multiple cards, including one with a picture of a cute kitten and another with a lovely beach scene. And then it threw in a random question about which the caller preferred—kittens or beaches!

Would you believe it? The call dragged on for over 6 minutes before the telemarketer finally gave up and hung up. Talk about wasting their time in the best possible way! Apparently, some of these Jolly Roger chatbot calls can last up to a whopping 15 minutes. Now that’s what I call a victory against telemarketers!

So, the next time you receive a call from an unknown number or a recorded telemarketer message, remember the legend of Roger Anderson and his AI-powered chatbots. You can just sit back, relax, and let the bots do the talking. Who knows, maybe you’ll have a good laugh and waste some telemarketers’ time while you’re at it!