“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?”…“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?” “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.
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, California, who employs chatbots and AI to frustrate and waste the time of telemarketers and scammers… 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.
…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 3 minutes. To Anderson, the moment is always magic…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 finally hangs up. Total time: 6 minutes, 27 seconds.