6 ms·

Artificial intelligence is being used to predict gambler behaviour

76 points by nwrk 8y ago

le-flaneur 8y ago
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.
- dictum 8y ago
  Time for a fork of https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt.
make3 8y ago
Do we really have to call anything that touches data science a bit AI.. that's almost just clickbait.
- black6 8y ago
  I'm starting to feel like Inigo Montoya every time I see/hear the term AI...
  - hunta2097 8y ago
    Yeah!! "You keep using that acronym..."
- g00gler 8y ago
  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.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    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.
Feeble 8y ago
What is the difference from any other marketing efforts to sell us buying expensive stuff we really don't need?
grepthisab 8y ago
“Revealed” is really clickbait titling. Reading the article, it has very little to do with AI, and nothing novel.
kristianc 8y ago
> “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.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  > 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 8y ago
    > 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
    - YouKnowBetter 8y ago
      The exact reason why google will, for years, happily ignore humongus ad-click-bot-farms.
thisisit 8y ago
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?
- crispyporkbites 8y ago
  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.
jimparkins 8y ago
“Every click is scrutinised in order to optimise profit, not to enhance a user’s experience.” So identical to every modern digital business then....
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  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.
plouffy 8y ago
In a couple of weeks: "Revealed: how amazon uses AI to keep shoppers shopping" and then "Revealed: how pornhub uses AI to keep ..."
kerrsclyde 8y ago
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.
bitL 8y ago
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.
currymj 8y ago
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.
21 8y ago
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.
yespleasethrow 8y ago
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...
- lightbyte 8y ago
  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.
  - rhombocombus 8y ago
    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.
- alehul 8y ago
  From the most recent a16z podcast featuring Ray Dalio, "Machine learning is merely finding the statistically best use (conclusion?) of the data."
vervez 8y ago
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.

76 points by nwrk 8y ago

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.

dictum 8y ago
Time for a fork of https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt.

make3 8y ago

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

black6 8y ago
I'm starting to feel like Inigo Montoya every time I see/hear the term AI...
- hunta2097 8y ago
  Yeah!! "You keep using that acronym..."
g00gler 8y ago
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.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  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.

Feeble 8y ago

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

grepthisab 8y ago

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

kristianc 8y ago

> “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.

Rjevski 8y ago
> 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 8y ago
  > 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
  - YouKnowBetter 8y ago
    The exact reason why google will, for years, happily ignore humongus ad-click-bot-farms.

thisisit 8y ago

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?

crispyporkbites 8y ago
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.

jimparkins 8y ago

“Every click is scrutinised in order to optimise profit, not to enhance a user’s experience.” So identical to every modern digital business then....

stochastic_monk 8y ago
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.

plouffy 8y ago

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

kerrsclyde 8y ago

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.

bitL 8y ago

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.

currymj 8y ago

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.

21 8y ago

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.

yespleasethrow 8y ago

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...

lightbyte 8y ago
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.
- rhombocombus 8y ago
  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.
alehul 8y ago
From the most recent a16z podcast featuring Ray Dalio, "Machine learning is merely finding the statistically best use (conclusion?) of the data."

vervez 8y ago

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.