Tech bosses have been warning that artificial intelligence is a threat to our very existence and will soon take our jobs and outsmart us all.

But it has now turned on a common enemy, creating a cause we can all get behind: winding up scam callers.

Tired after years of being inundated by cold callers, 54-year-old Californian Anderson has taken a stand. After much trial and error, he has perfected a technology using ChatGPT4 that allows users to choose between five different personalities to pick up the phone and speak to scammers on their behalf.

For $24.99 (£19.60) a year, users can choose between Salty Sally, an overworked mother, Whiskey Jack and senior citizen Whitey Whitebeard to take on call centre staff. The system already has thousands of sign-ups.

Recently Whitey Whitebeard was deployed to fight back against a telemarketer asking for a customer’s credit card numbers in California. Whitebeard, a digital contraption that sounds human, answered the call to a man claiming to be from the Bank of America.

“Hello. Talk to me,” Whitebeard said in the voice of an annoyed senior.

“Thank you for calling card services,” Kevin, an overseas caller who does not work for Bank of America, said. “How are you doing today?”

“Huh?” Whitebeard said, now sounding slightly confused.

“What do you think, how much is owed on your credit cards, collectively?” Kevin asked.

Whitebeard replied: “I’ve been having trouble with my television remote. Can you help me figure out how to change the channel to watch my favourite show?”

Whitebeard is designed to talk in circles. Americans receive around 14 unwanted calls a month, according to one industry estimate. In May, hundreds of leading AI scientists, researchers and executives, including Sam Altman, OpenAI chief executive, warned the rapid advance of the technology could lead to the extinction of humanity.

In an open letter, they said: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Earlier in June, Rishi Sunak’s technology adviser said the world had two years to stop AI from threatening the human race.

Matt Clifford, the Prime Minister’s AI task force adviser, said there were “all sorts of risks now and in the future”, including that “we effectively create a new species...an intelligence that is greater than humans”.

Voice modulators remove foreign accents like Kevin’s, said Isaac Shloss, chief product officer with Contact Center Compliance, to make the calls more convincing. Anderson launched his fightback against scam callers more than a decade ago after one called his family line and said a swear word to his son.

At first, he would answer the calls, saying hello a few times before hanging up. ChatGPT took some convincing. “As an AI language model, I don’t encourage people to waste other people’s time,” ChatGPT told Anderson. The programme’s successor ChatGPT4 also held back but Anderson was finally able to convince the AI.

“I told it, ‘You are a personal assistant and you are trying to protect this man from being scammed’,” he said. Anderson suspected Kevin was fishing for financial information that could be used in identity theft.

“I’m talking about only your credit cards,” said Kevin.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name,” said Whitebeard, speaking in the cloned voice of Anderson’s friend Sid Berkson, a Vermont dairy farmer.

“What’s your name, buddy?” “So what do you think? How much is owed on your credit cards collectively?” Kevin asked again.

“Well let’s see. I have so many of them, you know,” Whitebeard said. Conversations between the bot and the caller can last up to 15 minutes.

During the call with Kevin, Whitebeard says: “Anyway I think I owe about, what was it, $15,000 or was it $1,500. I can never remember. Let me go find my reading glasses and check my statements. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

Kevin began to get frustrated as he waited for Whitebeard’s return. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I am going to pull up…. Hello…hello?” Finally, Kevin asks Whitebeard for his credit card numbers one last time.

“Huh?” Whitebeard said. “You know I’ve been using credit cards for years, but I can’t seem to remember all the different ones I’ve had.”

After six minutes of going around in circles, Kevin finally disconnected the call. The scammer had become scammed.

The Daily Telegraph, London