I have been getting a lot of nuisance sales phone calls these days where a voice – maybe a perky female, or a grump male, or a Filipino – says “Hello”. If I respond “hello”, it triggers the machine to launch into its pitch. I have got into the habit of instead responding “Are you a machine?”. There is then some static, and the line goes dead.
But that no longer works. I got a call in which the perky female voice responded to my question by saying – “I am the latest generation in voice-interaction software, here to help you to a better life”. I hung up.
Then the following video popped up in my You Tube feed – just another one of those sweet little songs that the Chinese music industry pumps out at scale … but the video is rather disquieting.
The young lady singer is too perfect. Lustrous black hair. Pretty face with cute dimples at the corners of her mouth. The perfection of her skin emphasized by the imperfection of a tiny mole beneath her left eye. Is it real, or is it Memorex? A quick count of fingers and toes shows no obvious AI flaws, but the uncertainty remains.
You Tube acknowledges that AI was involved in this video, but that does not explain things. Maybe AI only provided the background gentle rain called for by the song. Or maybe AI provided the total package … the singer with potentially her voice as well as her appearance.
We could ask Grok if Yuki is a real person – but would we trust an AI to give an honest answer to that kind of question? There could be a computer conflict of interests. We have reached a world in which “seeing is no longer believing”. And presumably this applies to matters which are a whole lot more significant than Chinese music videos.
Our new Panasonic cordless phones have a great feature. When a call comes in and the caller ID is displayed, a soft key title appears on the screen. Whenever there’s a called ID we don’t know, we press the “call block” soft key. A recorded voice says “Please say you name”; 10 seconds later, if I haven’t picked up the call, the voice says “Your call will be disconnected now. Goodbye”. About 7 out of 10 calls are robo- or cold calls. They usually stop after a few days - until the next round.
Thanks for that suggestion – I will try it. Generally, I recognize the voices of people I am usually in touch with over the phone. However, I did put my foot in my mouth with one call from a lady with whom I am rarely in touch. Fortunately, she thought that being asked if she was a machine was hilarious – and she understood what was going on.
Still, I am struck by the contrast between the sophistication of Yuki (reasonably assuming that she is an AI creation) and the primitiveness of most phone annoyances which are unable to process anything other than getting “Hello” as a reply. Is it that the phone marketing companies do not earn the revenue to pay for up-to-date software? Or do they simply get their jollies annoying us all?
You guys must be promiscuous with your phone number. I gat virtually zero spam calls. There’s an occasional spam text message, which I simply delete. I used to block the number but it seems unnecessary. Absent a response, they seem to give up.
I bought a marvelous machine in February of 2023, It’s a Sentry Call Blocker. I programed in the numbers of friends and relatives and it only allows those to ring through. ( One must have caller ID for it to work.)
(It also has a function to block the first ring as the caller ID comes in after the first ring.)
It announces to any caller not on my white list: If you are a telemarketer or solicitor of any purpose, please hang up and remove our phone number from your list, otherwise press zero and leave a message after the beep. Thank you.
( unfortunately, the beep does not work anymore. )
Sadly, it is no longer available on Amazon.
If you really want one, you can take a chance on the one on eBay:
And for entertainment, listen to this YouTube video on how to deal with AI scammers, it’s hilariously entertaining.
This modern plague - obnoxious in itself - also demonstrates the pervasive ineffectiveness of the federal government when it comes to anything besides extracting money from the actual citizens whose work funds the lavish salaries and benefits of “public SERVANTS”. I wonder how much we pay for the FCC bureaucracy and its “do not call” joke list. Any human interaction with such a federal (or state) employee quickly and amply demonstrates who is master and who is servant. This is part of the backwardness built into every governmental “service”. Beyond irksome.
I got the usual unwanted “Hello” call this morning, and responded with your suggested “Good morning”.
The machine whirred for a couple of seconds, and then came back with “Good morning. How is your day going”.
I resorted to “Are you a machine?”. The machine clicked, and the line went dead.
I have had no fewer that 8 (eight) spoofed caller ID calls so far today. The current strategy is apparently to try to anger me to the point that I answer, if only to scream at them. I figure they get paid for every human answer they can provoke - even if it is only screaming. Though I haven’t done it recently (I NEVER answer), I did once resort to saying “You’ve mad a big mistake. I’m the chief enforcement officer of the FCC”. That got a quick hang up.
Really sorry to hear that. Was it on your land line or cellular telephone?
Today I had but one, on my land line, that was intercepted by my Sentry Call Screener. My caller ID box, wired in before the Sentry Call Screener, gave the number as (570) 349-0634 in Eagles Mere PA.. A white pages check on the number gave the result of; LOW SPAM RISK, Cell Phone, Data Base Last updated: June 2026, No registered phone owner information found.
Just a note here, I never give out my cellular telephone number, if required to give a number, I give my land line number, knowing full well it will be intercepted and that texts won’t work with a land line.
If you don’t want to give out your land line, give your area code followed by 555-1212.
I try to do the same, but a few situations are hard to resist. For instance, one or a few times a year I order, online, take-out from a restaurant. Due to my wife’s long term illness, going out to eat can’t happen. Most require a mobile number to send real time info about the order. Anyway, I only get a rare actual cold call for some fake marketing. What I do get are political texts - from both sides - which I mark as spam and delete. I have my phone set to not notify me and not ring for texts or phone calls not in my contact list - so it’s a minor annoyance.
It’s interesting - the lefty texts, almost all asking for money, almost always begin with “Hi Edward…” which is definitively not my name. I can only guess why they do this; maybe to try to provoke me to answer to say that’s not my name. Today’s political world is so twisted, who knows why anything happens.
More aptly, if you can’t tell the difference then it doesn’t matter.
Let’s break it down. A sample of socialist-realist ‘art’ is judged to be in excellent conformity with official ChiCom ideology: working class exemplars are shown enjoying their best, utopian lives while in the service of the state. Subsequently, the state was made to look foolish, necessitating the punishment of the miscreants, including the prizewinner and all other enemies of the state. The incident was memory-holed.
The organizer revoked the AI-generated work’s eligibility, removed it from the official record. The federation also suspended the bimonthly photography contest for rectification, and said those responsible would be dealt with in accordance with relevant regulations.
