DraftKings Uses A.I. To Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose | Hacker News Reader

DraftKings Uses A.I. To Target the Gamblers Likeliest to Lose

nytimes.com

70 pointskoolba16 comments

I believe a temperance movement is on the horizon. The fact that we've turned smartphones into vice dispensers (and surveillance devices but that's another topic) is one of the greatest failures of western society.

It's telling when the largest maker of these devices themselves put societal controls in place to curb the excesses of this device - yet they're failing miserably too. Or are they? Perhaps the result is also what they want internally.

I don’t think they care enough to limit the use of their own products to trust them to help solve the problem.

I was talking about the Chinese.

What social controls? Apple and Google get a cut of all the business that runs through their apps, including gambling apps. This has been the subject of numerous lawsuits.

You don't think the Play Store or the App Store are just giving out those apps and not making money from it, do you?

The app platforms are not only complicitous, they're enabling gambling by allowing these apps at all. It would be very simple to take them all away with TOS that banned gambling apps.

What platform has the ethics to do that? None.

I was talking about the Chinese.

Not sure if it was intentional, but saying "uses AI" in the headline makes it sound like this is a modern thing, but the techniques here are closer to the linear regression side of AI than the trasnformer side. The headline could have been "DraftKings Targets Problem Gamblers." It would have put the outrage where it should be.

I don't think the NYT cares where the outrage is directed as long as they get their clicks

NYT Uses A.I To Target the Type of Outrage Readers Likeliest to Click!

Should outrage not be directed at a gambling site that targets its most vulnerable users?

There is a special place in hell waiting for these people and everyone who helps enable their greed and the misery they produce. I bet their system also finds who is likeliest to win and finds a reason to ban them like casinos have been doing.

They don’t ban them, they limit them to tiny bets.

There is a market for established non-winning accounts you can sell to sharps.

Of course it does! Why pay all those machine learning/data employee salaries?

In 2016 I joined an online casino (as a PM) and was confronted by the biggest machine learning and real-time data operation I had ever seen at the time.

All about pushing wagering bonuses, measured by deposits.

At the time we still called this class of user "high value". Not allowed to do that anymore... Gives the game away!

When I was doing arbitrage and bonus farming, the process often involved wagering both sides of a bet on different sportsbooks. Result being that my DraftKings account was eventually down thousands of dollars over its lifetime.

So of course... they emailed me offering access to a VIP bonus program! To get in I just needed to keep betting as much as possible. Such nice people.

The gaming apps for many people are roughly equivalent to giving an opiate addict an app that dispenses heroin whenever they press a button.

https://archive.ph/UKVhg

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