Two guys who were fed up with spam calls created a ChatGPT tool that trolls telemarketers and wastes their time

• Jolly Roger is a telephone service that uses AI to fight back against pesky telemarketing calls.
• The service generates chatty, easily distracted characters that keep scammers on the line.
• With the prevalence of robocalls across the country, Jolly Roger serves as a way to fight back.

There's a new way to get back at scammy telemarketers — and it won't cost you more than $24.99 a year.

A telephone service called Jolly Roger harnesses ChatGPT and voice modulation software to create and read scripts to telemarketers. Acting as digital, fictitious characters, Jolly Roger keeps can keep telemarketers on the line indefinitely — wasting the scammers' time and giving the real phone owner immense satisfaction, The Wall Street Journal reported.

One scammer may be roped into talking to Whitey Whitebeard, a bumbling senior citizen, while another could catch Salty Sally, an easily distracted mother.

The service, which launched seven years ago, has introduced ChatGPT capabilities over the past several months. The result has been telemarketers kept on the phone for as long as 30 minutes, Roger Anderson, the company's cofounder told Insider.

After users pay for a subscription, they gain access to the service, which is a cloud-based phone system. There are also accompanying apps to view, listen, and share recorded calls between the bot and the frustrated telemarketer, as well as ways to create your own annoying characters.

Scam calls, which usually begin as an automated robot prompt before connecting a receiver with an actual human, have gotten even worse since 2016, the year Anderson and Steve Berkson founded Jolly Roger.

In February 2016, there were 2.28 billion spam calls made to US consumers. That number leapt to 5.19 billion by January 2019, peaking at 5.66 billion in October 2019. There were 4.7 billion spam calls made in November 2022 and 5.08 billion this past May, according to YouMail's robocall index.

Anderson and Berkson run the business in their spare time, while working day jobs in telecommunications, Anderson said.

"The old process involved sitting at a microphone while Steve or I would talk the talent through the phrases we needed," Anderson said, referring to when the company would hire actual actual voice actors to record a series of scripts.

Now, with ChatGPT, the two are able to automate and, in turn, diversify the entire process — creating more characters and scenarios to keep telemarketers on the line.

The powerful chatbot generates the script, which Jolly Roger feeds into Play.HT, an AI-powered text-to-voice generator that reads them off as the voice of the chosen character.

Friends and family have helped create these personas. Whitebeard is really the voice of Sid Berkson, Berkson's father, who only needed to provide 45 seconds of sample audio in order for Play.HT to clone his voice.

There was, however, some trial and error at first, because when prompted to "waste time" ChatGPT did not want to cooperate.

"I had to experiment with superprompts because the system initially said 'as a helpful AI model, it's not in my nature to waste time,'" Anderson said. "We eventually tuned the superprompts and got the bots to be the right amount of helpful but also funny and engaging."

Of course, Jolly Roger is keeping only a fraction of active scam callers busy, but its recent AI integration arrives as Washington seeks to crack down on call centers that flood US consumers with robocalls.

Last year, the Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force was formed and filed a lawsuit against an Arizona-based company, accusing it of making 7.5 billion robocalls to people on the National Do Not Call Registry.

Until a world where dubious calls from unidentified numbers exists, Jolly Roger will do its best to alleviate the annoyance.