coolmojo

Sorry, I am really bad at explaining things. By OSI, I meant was Open-source intelligence. And the proper abbreviation is OSINT. So this time instead of explaining, I just link to Wikipedia

Thank you. I did not know this.

If you are targeted they can get the number of your contacts by using OSI or other methods. But in most cases it is just a coincidence that it looks like that that someone you know is calling. All that said, if the call is coming from your contact named uncle Joe and some guy with a strange accent saying they are calling from Microsoft, you will know it is a scam.

They are not actually calling from your number. They just spoofing the caller ID. More on this in the Wikipedia article

If you want more details, let me refer to you to the Wikipedia article

The scammers are usually are sitting in a call center (in Asia usually.) However if they would call from that number people won’t pick it up or would not believe that it is Amazon, Microsoft or your bank. This is the reason they are pretending to be calling from an another (local) number. They can do this using a loophole in the roaming system. So this why you can receive calls pretending by to be your contact’s number or even from your own number. This is why just blocking those numbers is not that effective. Also if you call the number back, it is not the scammer, just a normal person or business with that number. Hope this explains it.

The scammers can spoof any number, including one of your contacts.

You are right. My pet peeve is that it is now used as a marketing term without actual meeting. Used to be the word smart. Now instead of “buy this smart toaster”, “buy this AI powered toaster”. Sorry if this reply was too verbose for your liking.

Perhaps, we should consider not calling all of them as AI. Machine learning is a useful tool.

Dogs are can be also better at detecting cancer than humans. And dogs tend to hallucinate less

You can use Perplexica instead, which is a self-hosted open source alternative to Perplexity.

If someone is interested in AI search, then there is Perplexica which is a self-hosted open source AI powered search engine. It uses your local LLMs instead of OpenAI servers.