The Most Expensive Phone Call Nobody Made

0:07 Nobody Wants To Be The Human Who Says No

AbbyWelcome to the Daily AI Slop podcast.

BoydWhere nothing we say becomes the truth.

Abby[excited] Today's thread: nobody wants to be the human who says no. A near-billion-euro fine for letting software fire people —

Boyd[jumping in] — and a lab study where a chatbot out-flirted an actual person for a week. Which apparently is the impressive one.

AbbyIt is the impressive one! It's also horrifying, but it's impressive.

Boyd[deadpan] And somewhere in County Wexford, a police force has typed the sentence "the Cat in the Hat was not in your driveway". We start with the money.

0:44 The Most Expensive Phone Call Nobody Made

Abby[excited] Main feature. The Dutch privacy regulator has fined Uber eight hundred and twenty-four million, nine hundred and ninety thousand euros.

BoydDecision dated the seventeenth of August. And this is not the two-hundred-and-ninety-million data-transfer fine from 2024 — different case, easy to conflate.

AbbyThe grounds: fully automated decisions about drivers, and then not telling the drivers it was happening.

BoydThe regulator says accounts were switched off and drivers permanently deactivated by software over ratings. Their income, gone, no human in it.

AbbyAnd there's one figure in the coverage — low ratings cost a hundred and twenty-six drivers their accounts across Europe in 2021.

Boyd[deadpan] By that number, that's about six and a half million euros per driver.

AbbyThe most expensive way yet discovered to avoid making a phone—

Boyd[jumping in] —call. Which was the cheapest thing available. Yes.

AbbyBoyd, this feels big. Near-billion, and it's about managing workers with an algorithm, not ad targeting. That's a floor.

Boyd[sigh] Here's why I don't have it yet: the conduct is 2020 to 2022 — 2018 by some accounts — Uber says it stopped years ago, and it's appealing this one as disproportionate. The money may never move.

AbbyOn disproportionate — Uber's turnover is roughly forty-four and a half billion, and the GDPR cap is four percent. This is under two.

BoydFair — that arithmetic is ours. But the decision text isn't public, nobody's published how many drivers were hit in total, and much of this is a transparency failure, not proof the firings were purely automatic. That's what the appeal court decides.

2:41 Forty-Six Versus Eighteen

Abby[excited] Second feature. And every headline this week says: AI beats professional scammers.

BoydThe paper doesn't say that. The paper is Gressel and colleagues, accepted to USENIX Security '26 — blinded, a week long, twenty-two people each texting two partners, one of them secretly a language model told to type like a human.

AbbyCompliance: forty-six percent for the bot, eighteen for the human. Higher emotional-trust scores, p equals nought point nought nought seven. IRB-approved, minimal-risk, with the deception authorised.

BoydAnd the human comparator was a researcher trained in romance-fraud tactics — not a quota-driven operator in a compound who has run this script two hundred times.

AbbyTwenty-two people, though—

Boyd[jumping in] —means the gap is a handful of people either way. What it shows is that a model can hold a persona for seven days. "Beats professional criminals" is the press release, not the data.

AbbyTwo corrections. It is not Northeastern, whatever the coverage says — the authors are at Amrita, Ben-Gurion, Ca' Foscari and Melbourne. And the preprint's been public since December, so this wave is an eight-month-old paper meeting a conference date.

Boyd[sigh] Mm. One number stated plainly, no embroidery: commercial safety filters from Meta, OpenAI and Google flagged nought point nought percent of the dialogues.

AbbyThat's the line I'd have put on the poster. Nobody did.

4:20 Something Useful

Abby[excited] And now — Something Useful.

BoydRotherham. Several GP surgeries there use an AI phone receptionist called EMMA, built by a UK company, QuantumLoopAI. Healthwatch Rotherham — the statutory patient watchdog — says patients report it can't always understand broad Yorkshire accents, or speech impediments.

AbbyOne patient told them: "I could never get it to understand me... I ended up just hanging up and not bothering to try and book an appointment."

BoydOthers just gave up. [deadpan] The fastest route to an appointment in Rotherham may now be your legs.

AbbyHere's the useful bit, once and clearly. The vendor told the BBC you can ask to speak to a human at any point — so ask, out loud, early. And Healthwatch flags reasonable adjustments — worth asking your practice for one directly.

BoydLimits: one town, one watchdog, no complaint count, no before-and-after data on people giving up. And every number in this story comes from vendors selling to practices — QuantumLoopAI says five hundred thousand calls a month, two million patients, "one hundred percent of calls answered". Their claim, their marketing.

AbbyAnd Futurism's headline says patients are skipping the doctor. The sourced behaviour is hanging up, or turning up on foot.

5:48 Something Weird

Boyd[deadpan] Something Weird. Two police forces, two islands, both now on record that the Cat in the Hat is not stalking anyone.

AbbyGardaí in Wexford, in writing: he "was not in your driveway while you were out and he is not currently hiding out in Curracloe."

BoydAnd South Yorkshire Police say they've had no reports of a cat in a hat at Meadowhall, or anywhere else in South Yorkshire.

AbbyThe sting is — no, start again. The sting is that part of the hoax was a fake Facebook post impersonating South Yorkshire Police.

BoydMm. The thing you check to calm yourself down had also been faked.

AbbySo how much of this is actually AI?

Boyd"AI-generated" is a Garda Facebook post's shorthand, not a forensic finding. No detection report, no provenance data, no creator. A lot of it looks like black-and-white-filtered clips from the 2026 Cat in the Hat film, meme edits — and in some cases a man in a costume.

Abby[laughs] A man in a costume. That's not AI, that's a Tuesday.

BoydPolice did an afternoon of this already, over the AI homeless man prank. Same panic, better tooling.

7:03 Tomorrow

AbbyTomorrow — the Uber appeal, and whether a Dutch court touches any of it.

BoydAnd we are still, somehow, trying to read a LinkedIn post.

AbbyWe're Daily AI Slop.

BoydNone of this becomes true just because we said it. See you tomorrow.