I received one of these calls several months ago, I believe it was pitching solar panels, however the bot initially refused to admit it was a bot. "I'm not a robot, I am a real human named Casey."
Eventually I broke out of its prompt and it admitted "you're correct, I am trained on a language model by OpenAI, I don't have a physical form or a persona."
The company employing this AI bot was Palmetto Solar in North Carolina. I sent them a demand letter for violating the FTC Do Not Call list and using a robodialer but I (unsurprisingly) did not get a response and didn't care enough to file in small claims court.
HenryAllen•9mo ago
Yes, this happens way more often than you think these AI cold callers work at scale and can go through a lead list at 100x the speed of a normal team. But they are being put together often by non-technical lowcode devs in ways which often leave exploits open.
Now I don't think it is a problem for these SMB's but for larger corporates looking to leverage this technology, the industry needs to have more heuristics / evals in place to measure deceptiveness and again how well it sticks to its system prompt lol!
In regards to the FTC, theres policy coming all the time. But it's still so fresh honestly its probably got to go viral with the general public before people start caring enough to enforce policy like that. I also imagined if you went to small claims court it would of been a weird experience due to the nature of the subject and lack of similar cases to look at?
floundy•9mo ago
Eventually I broke out of its prompt and it admitted "you're correct, I am trained on a language model by OpenAI, I don't have a physical form or a persona."
The company employing this AI bot was Palmetto Solar in North Carolina. I sent them a demand letter for violating the FTC Do Not Call list and using a robodialer but I (unsurprisingly) did not get a response and didn't care enough to file in small claims court.
HenryAllen•9mo ago
Now I don't think it is a problem for these SMB's but for larger corporates looking to leverage this technology, the industry needs to have more heuristics / evals in place to measure deceptiveness and again how well it sticks to its system prompt lol!
In regards to the FTC, theres policy coming all the time. But it's still so fresh honestly its probably got to go viral with the general public before people start caring enough to enforce policy like that. I also imagined if you went to small claims court it would of been a weird experience due to the nature of the subject and lack of similar cases to look at?