
Artificial intelligence is being used to predict gambler behaviour - nwrk
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/30/bookies-using-ai-to-keep-gamblers-hooked-insiders-say
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le-flaneur
The article had VERY little to say about AI. Nothing described in the piece is
anything more than what physical/online retailers, Amazon, Facebook, et al do
to retain customers and drive sales.

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dictum
Time for a fork of [https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-
butt](https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt).

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yespleasethrow
You can actually take most of the bullshit out of an "AI!!!!" headline by
simply replacing "AI" with "computers".

"Artificial intelligence is being used to predict gambler behaviour" \-->
"computers are being used to predict gambler behaviour"

I think it's a lot more reflective of what's actually going on and removes a
lot of the clickbaity hype...

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lightbyte
I think it's more accurate if you replace it with "statistical analysis"
instead. The computers are just computing very complex equations with your
data as an input, but technically you could try doing it by hand.

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rhombocombus
That was actually how my stats prof made us learn all of the analyses, she
thought if you can't do it by hand you won't understand what the computer is
doing either. I found that to be really useful for just about every
statistical technique I have used.

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21
I'm aware of one gambling company which looks up customer addresses on Google
Street View to see in what kind of place they live. If you look wealthy they
will send the big guns after you.

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jimparkins
“Every click is scrutinised in order to optimise profit, not to enhance a
user’s experience.”

So identical to every modern digital business then....

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stochastic_monk
I’ve seen user experience degrade across the board on apps over the last 5
years for what I assume is precisely this reason.

These are not the robots we were promised.

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kristianc
> “I’ve often heard people wonder about how they are targeted so accurately
> and it’s no wonder because its all hidden in the small print.”

> Publicly, gambling executives boast of increasingly sophisticated
> advertising keeping people betting, while privately conceding that some are
> more susceptible to gambling addiction when bombarded with these type of
> bespoke ads and incentives.

Meanwhile, in the real world, hardly anyone clicks on a banner ad ever. A
perfectly polished targeted turd is still a turd.

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Rjevski
> in the real world, hardly anyone clicks on a banner ad ever

In _our world_. Let’s be honest, there has to be a category of people that
still falls for them, otherwise people wouldn’t keep investing billions into
this bullshit industry.

The tech-illiterate are still very much prey for ads, I’ve had first hand
evidence of this a few days ago from my flatmate (the typical idiot who “logs
in with Facebook” everywhere, has 50k+ unread email on a Yahoo address and
reuses the same password everywhere) when she fell for some weight loss pill
scam ad on Facebook. I had to help her chargeback the transactions with her
credit card provider.

~~~
kristianc
> In our world. Let’s be honest, there has to be a category of people that
> still falls for them, otherwise people wouldn’t keep investing billions into
> this bullshit industry.

Not just in "our world." The average CTR is 0.06%, and that's from Google's
figures [1], 60% of banner ad clicks are accidental, 54% of Internet users
have _never_ clicked one. 25% use ad blockers.

They persist because they're a) cheap, b) because everyone else does it, and
c) because they may, tangentially, have some brand uplift though no-one can
actually prove it. Some desperately dastardly mindfuck scheme they are not.

[1]
[http://www.richmediagallery.com/learn/benchmarks](http://www.richmediagallery.com/learn/benchmarks)

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blanderman
I imagine that my CTR must be much higher than average, because I will click
on any ads for brands that I dislike. The idea being that I am transferring
money from the advertiser to the site that I am visiting.

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grepthisab
“Revealed” is really clickbait titling. Reading the article, it has very
little to do with AI, and nothing novel.

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plouffy
In a couple of weeks: "Revealed: how amazon uses AI to keep shoppers shopping"
and then "Revealed: how pornhub uses AI to keep ..."

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vervez
Since it seems unlikely that governments will ban the use of data by companies
for certain purposes like this or pay citizens a universal income for simply
providing data to companies online, at least in the near-term, this seem like
a ripe opportunity for more "counter-AI" and/or privacy apps.

I love using Ghostery to provide privacy. Why aren't there more consumer-
facing apps that provide privacy or indicate when and how consumers may be
manipulated by algorithms? Say you _paid_ (nothing's free) an app to monitor
your internet activity, allowing it to track and indicate how your personal
habits may be exposing you to bias/bad decisions? I think this could help
provide the average consumer with a sanity check. Knowing that you're being
manipulated and someone is making a profit at your expense probably is one of
the biggest motivators to alter human behavior, at least in Western society.

But hey, I still refuse to get Amazon Prime, so what do I know about the
average consumer behavior.

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Feeble
What is the difference from any other marketing efforts to sell us buying
expensive stuff we really don't need?

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make3
Do we really have to call anything that touches data science a bit AI.. that's
almost just clickbait.

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g00gler
The media does a terrible job of describing AI/ML.

My roommate was under the impression that Facebook shut down their experiment
wherein chatbots communicated with each other because they were scared of the
consequences of the machines communicating in their own language.

For the unaware, Facebook determined it wasn’t useful to continue the
exercise.

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thanatropism
This isn't terribly hard to achieve. E.g with a pretrained LSTM generator
downloaded from some place that does neural network stuff + a homebrew text
classifier (I'm fond of character-level online linear models with long n-gram
ranges) that's just underpowered enough to overspecialize to a certain style,
but unpredictably so. Make this poor man's model generative by choosing random
combinations of characters that hit a high enough score; and then feed it to
the LSTM (along with normal text samples).

The underpowered generator creates weird stuff that the good generator absorbs
into its language model. Boom, you are witnessing the technological
singularity. Or something.

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bitL
AI is used to predict XYZ. Well, given the short sentence describing ML is
"how to make predictions from data", this is really not surprising. Now, what
is the success rate is the only question that matters.

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kerrsclyde
Supercharging peoples addiction to their phones, an even bigger dopamine hit
if there is a chance you might win money too.

Given the amount of time it has taken to tackle the outdated FOBT machine
legislation in the UK I can't see the gambling companies being slowed anytime
soon.

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thisisit
Sometimes I wonder is there new research in the world of advertising and AI?

Tracking clicks via heatmaps, pageviews etc has been done for ages. So, has
AI/ML provided better ways to convert those ads?

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crispyporkbites
There are improved models for segmenting customers, predicting next best
actions etc. It's also a lot easier to run them now (e.g. handling terabytes
of data isn't difficult, petabytes is increasingly common)

So it's improved a bit but not much more. The people selling this stuff are
marketeers selling to other marketeers, so the sales pitches are getting
better and better for sure.

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currymj
the gambling industry pioneered a lot of the techniques now used for web
sites, far earlier.

“time on device” is something they coined and started optimizing for decades
ago.

