Maggie's Farm

British mobile phone company O2 has unveiled a new creation, Daisy, a chit-chat and kitty-cat loving artificial intelligence "granny" who talks to scammers to keep them away from real people.

. . . O2, the company behind the scam-baiting granny, said the AI technology can keep scammers on the phone for 40 minutes at a time. Daisy was trained with the help of YouTuber and software engineer Jim Browning, who has made an online career exposing scammers to his community of 4.4 million subscribers.

In order to bait scammers into time-wasting calls, the company utilized the practice of "number seeding," which put the AI granny's number on lists used by scammers to find their victims. The granny gimmick's goal is twofold: to keep scammers away from real people and to raise awareness about the dangers of risky phone hoaxes.

The White House ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal regulatory agency, to expand its use of "Indigenous Knowledge" on Monday, as part of a last-minute push in the federal government to embrace what scientists call pseudoscience.

. . . "Indigenous Knowledge" is a discredited belief system posting that native-born peoples possess an innate understanding of how the universe works.