The White House Wants to Wield the Terrifying Power of AI Against Robocalls

VP Harris announced virtual hackathons to combat phone scams that target the elderly, among other US initiatives, at Rishi Sunak’s AI Summit.

Vice President Kamala Harris announced a swath of new initiatives at the United Kingdom’s Global Summit on AI Safety Wednesday, including the establishment of the United States AI Safety Institute. One of the initiatives outlined by the White House is to combat fraudulent robocalls using artificial intelligence.

The White House will host virtual hackathons to fight fraudulent spam callers, particularly those using novel AI-generated voice models. VP Harris invites technology experts around the country to build artificial intelligence-based solutions to fend off the scams that particularly target the elderly. This initiative, among others announced by VP Harris Wednesday, expands on Joe Biden’s executive order calling on Congress to regulate artificial intelligence…

Until now, the majority of us might have simply hung up on robocallers. However, there’s now a way to get back at the companies who torment you with endless robocalls that ask you for your information or try to sell you stuff. The solution is called Robo Revenge, a service that lets you sue the unwanted caller for up to $3,000 per call.

Robo Revenge is the latest service offered by DoNotPay, a robot lawyer app that lets consumers do things like appeal parking tickets, cancel services or subscriptions or schedule appointments at government offices, among others. Joshua Browder, DoNotPay’s founder and CEO, told Motherboard that big companies have failed to protect consumers from robocalls. This means that they have to take measures for themselves.

The Federal Trade Commission has strict rules that, in its own words, make “virtually all” telemarketing robocalls illegal. But we’ve still seen the number of complaints about robocalls explode over the last few years. On Tuesday, the FTC announced it’s doing something about it by suing some kingpins who allegedly facilitated billions of unwanted calls.

The consumer watchdog has filed a formal complaint in federal court against the people behind companies that allegedly facilitated and engaged in “illegal robocalls, calls to numbers on the Do Not Call Registry, calls with spoofed caller IDs, and abandoned calls, in which TelWeb hung up on consumers who answered.”…

March 16, 2017

T-Mobile is just the latest mobile carrier to deal with problematic 911 calls, but this time, the problems are bad. Like so bad, people are dying. This month, numerous “ghost calls” from T-Mobile numbers flooded 911 call centers in Texas and have been linked to two deaths. And although the calls originated from T-Mobile devices, people using all carriers were unable to reach 911 dispatchers during the incidents. Scarier still, nobody knows what’s causing them…