alt Hacker NewsDraftKings is using AI to behaviorally target chronic gamblers
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I would be genuinely surprised if they weren't.
My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and ran experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.
Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.
I like how you have to be an accredited investor to get involved with riskier investment instruments but you can be a total moron with no money and lose whatever you have left betting on sports and prediction markets.
Btw it’s not just those two, add iGaming into the mix which is cell phone gambling glammed up in Candy Crush form. Leeches, all of them.
Somebody said (I think it was FrostPrime) roughly: Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug, I actually think it's worse than cocaine and it's just right there on your phone.
I think that really framed the issue well to me. Imagine having an addiction problem and having to carry the problem substance around with you 24/7.
Man, who would be so stupid to get addicted to gambling?
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“Gambling company leans into its target demographic”
I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players” that would compulsively buy at the gas station.
I quit that job because it seems to be morally wrong.
Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
Chronic losers, says the article. Not whales. That's unexpected. I'd thought that those big gambling sites were parimutuel, where the counterparty is other bettors and the site just takes a cut. Horse racing tracks and prediction markets work that way. The house can't lose, and doesn't care who wins. The odds keep changing as bets come in and the odds rebalance.
Apparently that's not true for sports betting. A 2024 study out of Connecticut found that 1.8% of problem gamblers in the state accounted for 51% of sports betting revenue.[1]
[1] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/DMHAS/Publications/2023-CT-FIN...
Calling online casinos “prediction markets” doesn't mean they get a moral exemption.
Using AI to attract people with gambling addictions and those most likely to lose money is rotten.
I hope our industry develops an immune response that creates real friction to those building and funding these things.
I frequently get DraftKings ad on YouTube featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas, they're pushing the information that it is now legal in every state.
I also get loads Polymarket and Kalshi ads. Polymarket seems to have invested tons into featuring mega celebs like LeBron in one of their ads. Other ads feature influencers showing off how to trade and such. More obnoxious part is that these companies pay influencers to talk about trading and winning live on streams- without disclosing they're paying those influencers.
Polymarket even set up fake website where influencers showed they were winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You wouldn't find those bets on the real Polymarket website.
Couldn't we make an argument that Meta is using AI to behaviorally target chronic lazy thinkers?
On a serious note: no idea why we legalized nation wide (maybe it's just certain states) gambling on Sports. Money talks. We know this.
I lived in Boston during the early hey day of DraftKings in 2015 when it was just a game, and they spent something like 250M of series C money on marketing [1]. The entire city was pretty much "littered" with ads. Everywhere you looked. I interviewed there as it was one of the hottest startups in the city. But for some reason, I knew it was a front-door into sports betting and I was pretty off-put by the whole thing. Didn't know it would go as far as it did, though. (Also, I didn't want to write C#.)
A toast to all of you who've left career money on the table because you have some minimal form of ethics and morality.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/7/26/11615054/another-unicorn-is-bo...
And I would add... There is a sophisticated ecosystem of profiling and psycho-managing potential addicts from before they've even signed up.
Affiliates, data brokers, dodgy media inventory, credit bureaus, specialised CRMs (known to be leading edge on segmentation and ROI prediction) etc. etc.
I worked in gaming for a long time. I'm sorry to break it to you, but this is the entire gaming industry(not just gambling). And it has been that at least since the early 2010s when I got involved and all the way until I got away from it.
Some betting company made a partnership with my area's public bus system to put their ads on the side of the bus. There is no recourse for this, it seems, and this explosion of gambling ads is only going to get worse.
> The more data a company has, the more personalized the ad can be.
Cue me looking pensively at my Apple Watch, happily collecting my biometrics for about a decade now.
I’ll look at cheap dumb watches and see how difficult it is to switch back.
You can just ban these gambling and marijuana companies that cause harm to people. This article does a good job of summarizing a few, but not all of the reasons https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/09/29/...
Legalizing sports betting and online gambling was such a massive mistake. They are sleazy immoral industries that profit on suffering.
I knew I would reach the top of some list, not the top list I wanted to be at but damn the phone is ringing non stop from DraftKings.
And this is the sort of use of AI that ought to be regulated. But it's not as exciting as an AI going foom and cleansing the planet of the scientifically illiterate so it doesn't get traction.
Why would you even need AI to target losing customers? It's easy enough to identify them without anything clever: just look at their PnL or EV.
What do you expect? They thrive on addicts. No different than NYSE:META, and NYSE:RDDT, and NYSE:BUD and NYSE:TAP and NYSE:(fill in whatever proven-to-be-addicting product you want)
I used to work in adtech and someone in sales told me that DraftKings and FanDuel did not like being referred to as gambling companies. They always wanted to convince people that it wasn't gambling, even though it's so obvious that's what it is.
DraftKings also owns JackPocket, in case you want to play your local state lotto without ever leaving the house.
On a related note: Brasil has just passed a bill to ban gambling platforms and “””influencers””” are crying left right and centre for losing their sweet sweet sponsor blood money. Music to the ears, almost.
Online dating apps do the same exact thing. When you try to disengage they spam you with notifications and emails saying a bunch of people want to talk to you.
You actually login or god forbid pay for a subscription, all of your matches are disabled bot accounts. I actually have a theory that daiting apps are responsible for a significant portion if not most of those bots.
I’m actually more willing to work on a gambling or prediction product vs a dating app.
At least everyone knows gambling is a scam.
Spend any time examining the behavior of gambling companies and this will be utterly unsurprising.
The way they operate their business is deeply immoral.
They know they sell an addictive product and take full advantage of that.
This should come as no surprise to anybody. They have every incentive to exploit those who can't resist their offering. Gambling is the new tobacco industry.
It's like "customer success", weaponized.
I worked in a large and well known online casino as a technical account manager. I promise you, for all the "responsible gaming" stuff they have written everywhere, if a big account decides to stop playing (let's say they just want a break from gambling), their personal am will be arranging free trips and vip treatment to keep them on the tables. I have seen it happen and it disgusted me. I no longer work for such companies
meanwhile, free-to-play gaming's business model is to speedrun through the population via ads to find the most mentally unwell or underdeveloped people with access to credit cards or at least grandmothers who will buy them gift cards
Of course they are. They're also doing things like offering big sign up incentives with long play-through requirements (you know, the "200 in bonus bets when you deposit $5" thing) to try to get people to download it, gamble a bunch, and become addicts. Some people play it through, take the $20 thats left, and they're done. But some people start playing more regularly. Its all extraordinarily predatory and I'm pissed off every time I see a PrizePicks billboard on my commute. This stuff shouldn't even be legal.
They'll always do this. It's not even "AI" it's just a boring old ML model.
Money Stuff did a great bit on this a few days ago. There's 2 functions inside DraftKings:
- Fin the most lucrative customers, to keep engaging them.
- Finds addicted gamblers, to get them help to quit gambling.
These are the same people.
Sure, yeah, there's a nice little story about gambling within your means, blah blah. But if you're optimizing your gambling app, you're going to find and create problematic gambling as the core objective.
AI, ML, whatever. It's a gambling company. It targets gamblers. It probably shouldn't exist.
They did it before "AI" using machine learning.
AI - always associated with Evil. Yet people still think AI will fix everything ...
Of course it is. That's where they make their money. In other news, the local drug dealer is targeting drug addicts and the bar still serves the alcoholic who has destroyed his family and is drinking himself to death.
Well, it's just good business!
I wish gambling was outlawed entirely. Let bookies run it in some crack dens, I don't care about that, but every single gambling ad I see in the open is infuriating for me like no other ads. It's been seeping into sports commentary and even news on TV, "oh I don't think we have a full picture of the situation Kalshi has it at 60%", die in a fire. It's comparable to scammers preying on grandma.
No, I don't care about the "but liberty!" arguments.
Another perfect example of why we don't need new laws, we "simply" need to enforce them. Supposedly, Dark Patterns are illegal. If the corporation had to tell you how they use your data, would you let them?
DraftKings: Hi we're going to give you extra incentives! User: Hmm, sounds like I might like that. How do I get them? DraftKings: You have to lose constantly! And then when you start winning, we take them away! You like that, don't you? User: No.
Dark Pattern. No new rules needed. "Just" enforcement.
It's so incredibly sad that gambling is such a widespread industry, even supported on a state level. It's rather conclusively a tax on the poor. It preys on desperation and lack of statistical understanding. I'm immediately suspect of anyone that supports it.
We will soon look back at these companies like we did the pharma companies that created the opioid crisis in America.
And by that I mean almost no one in charge will be held responsible.
If you are vetting a romantic partner or a business partner, I would strongly urge you to check their phone. If they have DraftKings or FanDuel installed... run. Some might even say they lose some but it's for entertainment. I'd still trust them less than a social heroin user.
You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off. You're bad for business because the pigeons need to win occasionally to keep playing (and losing).
Gambling (and I include Kalshi and Polymarket here) shouldn't be this accessible. Back when you had to go to a casino, it was still bad but that barrier prevented a lot of harm. Being able to gamble away your future and your family's future from the comfort of your phone simply shouldn't be allowed.
I would be surprised if this was not already systemic and endemic across the retail space preying on people who have compulsive spending, gambling issues.
Ban this shit. Fuck anyone who works at these companies.
Not sure if I'm not losing enough or not gambling enough money, but those bastards barely send me any promotions.
We need to see the kind of regulation of these apps and websites that you see with state gambling control boards. If you need to present ID to walk onto a casino floor, you should need one to log onto these services. Each time. You should be able to ban yourself at the device account level. The odds need to be regulated.
Physical casinos sell to their whales, they’re what keeps them in business. Digital casinos sell to their whales, they’re what keeps them in business.
Casinos are a for profit business. If we don’t want them pursuing the path of least resistance we need regulation and enforcement.
Back in my day this was called machine learning.
"You show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome"
Ah, another boon of LLMs for mankind. Up there with the use of the 'Lavender' LLM to produce targets for the Israeli military to bomb in Gaza:
Prevously on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765288
ProPublica had one of their reports work with gambling addition experts to see how DraftKings would respond to someone presenting signs of a gambling problem. It's a hell of a read, and makes it clear that this company is full of people with absolutely no ethics whatsoever.
https://www.propublica.org/article/draftkings-sports-gamblin...