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I think regardless of the specifics, using generative AI to manipulate people into gambling is predatory and immoral. It's psychological abuse to manipulate peo

• ethbr1 3y ago
  Generative AI is fundamentally "more volume" than anything else. > Some of the worst "abuses of AI" are going to be things we've already fully normalized In this case, I can't see more advertisement substantially altering the experience. Possibly micro-targeted images? But is that really going to change the net effect of advertising?
• SamBam 3y ago
  While you're right, the AI part is almost irrelevant. I think it's immoral that states can advertise their lotteries full-stop. True, the AI part will make this worse, especially if states get into really targeted advertisements. But the morality line is already being crossed daily.
  • JTbane 3y ago
    I don't have a problem with state lotteries because it's essentially charity towards public works. You could argue that the gambling aspect makes it addictive, but it's basically entertainment.
    • vouaobrasil 3y ago
      Well, there is a fine line betweeen entertainment and a drug. That is precisely what makes entertainment so protected by modern governments and corporations: they know where that line is, and how to cross it.
    • walthamstow 3y ago
      A massively profitable charity towards public works funded exclusively by poor and lower-middle working people who are addicted to waiting for their numbers each week
    • nerdjon 3y ago
      I would buy this argument until they advertise it. Everyone knows what the lottery is, there is basically zero reason to do any advertising for it. Advertising it is encouraging addictive behavior. I think it is fine that the state runs it, but not the way that many do. It being a charity doesn't absolve them from bad behavior, plenty of charities have been... controversial.
  • vouaobrasil 3y ago
    > While you're right, the AI part is almost irrelevant. I think it's immoral that states can advertise their lotteries full-stop. Well, it does highlight the fact that AI will make this sort of manipulation so much easier and faster. Imagine a world where there the only vehicles are bicycles and people crash frequently. Now, the first car is introduced and someone crashes at 100MPH -- would you really say that the car is irrelevant to the situation because people have been crashing for decades? Yes, you are right: the root problem is the way we view people's minds as a resource to be exploited through psychological manipulation, but that does not make irrelevant the very real new danger of AI.
    • ToucanLoucan 3y ago
      > would you really say that the car is irrelevant to the situation because people have been crashing for decades? The tragic irony being that's basically what we did and continue to do.
      • jprete 3y ago
        I understand why you might say that - particularly at a societal level - but individual drivers: * Must be licensed * Must have a minimum level of liability insurance that covers other participants in an accident * Can be fined, get higher insurance premiums, and lose their licenses for breaking driving laws * Can be put in jail for felonies for sufficiently reckless driving that has the potential to endanger others As I understand it, commercially licensed drivers usually have even higher requirements and lose their licenses more easily for driving infractions. GenAI makes a lot of creative actions much easier, faster, automatable, and available to everyone, and "everyone" includes a lot of people with no foresight or discipline whatsoever.
        • Swizec 3y ago
          None of this was true when cars were first introduced. Back in the early 20th century it was considered fairly normal that drivers would just sort of plow through pedestrians if they’re in the way. Big societal battle over who gets to be in streets – the people who have always been there, or the cars. Eventually jaywalking was invented as a concept by the car lobby. > And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern...
  • dhosek 3y ago
    Worse still, because it’s a state-run lottery, it’s not subject to truth in advertising laws so they can advertise the jackpot that you would receive over 30 years as if it were the lump sum payment that you’d receive for winning.
    • robin_reala 3y ago
      Why are they not subject to those laws?
  • verisimi 3y ago
    Its one thing for a human to pay another human to call up leads or whatever, and an entirely other thing to create a factory to do the same job and hit thousands/millions at a lower cost than someone would pay the single human. The scale difference is significant, albeit I also agree that neither is moral.
  • hackerlight 3y ago
    I go further than this. It's immoral to weaponize someone's evolved dopamine system against their own long-term interests. Whether that's fast food, alcohol, social media, loot boxes or gambling. It's fine to have products in these loose categories, but we've clearly gone overboard when people are fat and depressed because their evolved circuits have been so thoroughly hacked like moths to a flame. At some point we're no longer in the paradigm of voluntary consumer choice.
    • apantel 3y ago
      That’s… most media, most products, most services.
      • hamburga 3y ago
        Exactly :/ Not illegal, but immoral
      • hackerlight 3y ago
        That's forcing things into an artificial binary when it's more appropriate to think of it as a spectrum, with unambiguously aligned products (e.g whole foods that improve user health) on the one hand and unambiguously exploitative products (e.g krokodil) on the other.
    • logicchains 3y ago
      >when people are fat and depressed because their evolved circuits have been so thoroughly hacked like moths to a flame People in America are fat and depressed because of a culture of looking to blame biology for poor self control rather than take responsibility for their own behaviour. Advertising is just as much of a thing in East Asia but it doesn't have the obesity problem that the west has, because there it's regarded as a personal failing. Advertisement was just as much a thing in America 50 years ago as it is now, but people weren't fat and depressed then, because people were told to take responsibility for their diet and their state of mind. Willpower is like a muscle, it's been proven to strengthen with use. Letting people get away with blaming advertisement, biology or whatever for their failures prevents them ever needing to develop their willpower.
  • diydsp 3y ago
    > immoral that states can advertise their lotteries full-stop. State lotteries are a compromise: They inhibit underground lotteries. The goal of the state lotteries is to divert people away from the danger of the underground while keeping itself from being overly attractive.
    • edgyquant 3y ago
      Why do they need to be state controlled for this? This is the same argument for casinos but states don’t run those.
      • Err_Eek 3y ago
        > This is the same argument for casinos but states don’t run those. In most (or at least a lot of) countries states regulate casinos _so much_ than it becomes almost a technicality that casinos are privately owned. Also with lotteries you have the scale factor -- in order to have an attractive lottery, you need a ton of ticket buyers, so if you have a national level lottery you can definitely make neighborhood lotteries way less appealing. Blackjack and poker tables don't scale the same way.
    • whiterknight 3y ago
      We have seen how well this argument holds up with sports betting, which went from something people do in Vegas on vacation to a significant portion of 20-30 year old males pay checks. Accessibility and marketing matters.
      • iamthirsty 3y ago
        I don't know where you grew up, but in almost every college guy's social network (usually already consisting of sports guys) we all knew a guy and didn't just bet in Vegas on vacation. It has always been a significant part of 20-30 yo male paychecks, now it's just acceptable to advertise on ESPN.
        • noolean 3y ago
  • Intermernet 3y ago
    Can I take this a step further and say that advertising is the true problem here? I tend to think most things should be legal, but advertising most things should be banned. It seems that society can't delineate between accepting a practice and promoting a practice.
    • bartonfink 3y ago
      Pot, meet kettle.
    • Fubarberry 3y ago
      What would you recommend as an alternative to advertisements? I do think a lot of ads go too far, but I think some form of advertisement is necessary to get new awareness of new brands and products. Otherwise only the pre-established large brands and products will ever get sales, which would lead to a lack of competition and all the negatives that come with that.
      • n4r9 3y ago
        In a civilised society, among other regulations, advertisements would be shown only to people that have pro-actively searched for a service or product.
        • stuart73547373 3y ago
          this would be great if everyone was rich enough to afford to pay for their services with money. but it would cut off a lot of services and opportunities for everyone else who is able to pay with their attention (to ads) instead
          • secstate 3y ago
            I mean, we're basically heading towards a basic minimum income at that point, where you truncate the top 5% of the tax ladder and redistribute it to the bottom 25%. At that point, people could pay for services. Dig a little into the idea that people can "pay" with their attention (and with their poor health, crappy buying decisions, personal freedoms) might fit the dictionary definition of sinister.
  • cryptonector 3y ago
    > I think it's immoral that states can advertise their lotteries full-stop. Is it advertising lotteries that is immoral, or the lotteries themselves?
• 8338550bff96 3y ago
  > I think regardless of the specifics, using <compound noun> to manipulate people into gambling is predatory and immoral... Fixed this for you bro
  • vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Okay, so that means these two sentences are the same: "It is very immoral to stab someone with a knife." "It is very immoral to kill a billion people with a bomb." And we should treat these situations with the same attention. Whatever happened to considering magnitude?
    • Aerroon 3y ago
      Aren't they equivalent in terms of morality? If they aren't, then you've basically answered the Trolley Problem by implying that the outcome with more deaths is morally worse. Magnitude is a question of pragmatism. I don't think pragmatism is very popular among people when looking at things like the war on drugs (despite so many people being against it, nothing has changed).
    • 8338550bff96 3y ago
      Why are you using sentences other than the template that I showed? The outcome for "It is very immoral to stab someone with a knife." and "It is very immoral to kill a billion people with a bomb." is very different in scale and kind. What I highlighted is that the means by which a common objective is reached is irrelevant when the objective is inherently immoral. I hope this helps you understand how language works.
      • vouaobrasil 3y ago
        > What I highlighted is that the means by which a common objective is reached is irrelevant when the objective is inherently immoral. I disagree completely if after the initial objective is reached, the means then propagates the reaching of further objectives that are also immoral. And the more advanced the technology, the more immoral means will be reached.
    • 3y ago
• silverquiet 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Well, in general, there is a very strong mythology with technophiles in general and here in particular. It is the mythology that we should further technological progress because, well, "because!" Unfortunately, this mythology is becoming exceptionally maladaptive in modern society but we can't see it because it is so deeply ingrained.
    • kevindamm 3y ago
      It is so deeply ingrained because there are many ways in which technology has made life better, both for the technophile and the average person. Admittedly, there are many harms as well. I can't say whether one outweighs the other, and perhaps it is because the technophile often avoids many of the involved harms that it becomes too easy for many to overlook them or play down the impact.
      • vouaobrasil 3y ago
        It is a difficult question indeed, and it depends also on the following: are we measuring the developments of today by how they will affect the world in 10 years or 100? Most people seem to agree that the latter is the more logical measure, yet we operate as if we are using the former.
    • silverquiet 3y ago
      My biggest complaint is the tendency to conflate change with progress. Perhaps I'm something of a luddite, but in the last ten to fifteen years or so, I have seen plenty of change, but whether it has been beneficial is often hard to suss out. It seems rather uncontroversial now that social media is detrimental to teen mental health (and I really don't think it's limited to teens). From the start I saw reasoned arguments that this sort of technology was deleterious for a few reasons, but the counterargument I usually saw here was, "yeah, but look at how much Facebook pays developers... and they contribute to open source". Two of the most prestigious of companies here, the F and the G in FAANG are purely advertising companies (and the others have plenty of it as well); what are they doing but trying to manipulate you into buying things you probably don't need? Obviously the pay is attractive, but is that how anyone but a psychopath wants to spend their career?
• nerdjon 3y ago
  I really want to know who green lit this after seeing all of the controversy with Google and was like, yeah we won't have a problem like that billion dollar company. There are already a lot of sleazy ads that I see for gambling and the lottery. But this is extremely predatory since it personifies the possible winning. This should be straight up illegal.
  • MPSimmons 3y ago
    >after seeing all of the controversy with Google This reeks of someone doing absolutely no market research
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• hobs 3y ago
  Oh we reflect on it all the time allright, its just that those in power like the status quo, and will put forth enormous effort to keep it.
• duped 3y ago
  Gambling is predatory and immoral(*), regardless of what technology is used to advertise it. I know that makes me sound like a tea totaler who was trapped in cryogenic sleep for the last century, but I really can't think of a good reason to allow any kind of gambling at scale in our society. It's filled with negatives. (*) of course, this is my opinion, you might not have the same morals as I do.
  • GreenWatermelon 3y ago
    > It's filled with negative I would even say it's only negatives. But unfortunately, it will have to stay legal, otherwise people would still seek it through illegal means, possibly exposing themselves to much worse dangers. It's the same problem with drugs (including Alcohol) and tobacco, they need to be legal in order to he regulated.
    • duped 3y ago
      I disagree, because industrialized gambling is very different from illegal gambling in terms of availability. I see the prevalence of slots in my neighborhood after they legalized gambling wholesale in my state and I don't think it's been made better by "regulation" except through some additional taxes, it's just made it easier to access. The same could be said about prohibition for alcohol and tobacco. Raising the age for legal tobacco consumption did reduce consumption, and prohibition did lower consumption permanently for alcohol.
• rdtsc 3y ago
  > manipulate people into gambling is predatory and immoral Exactly. Especially at the government level. Fine, some states allow casinos to operate, but it's pretty evil when they run lotteries themselves. The ridiculous reason "we're using these funds this to help educate people about math" is just that, ridiculous.
• SilasX 3y ago
  I think, regardless of the specifics, using a HN discussion as a pretense to push your tangentially-related pet issue is immoral.
• throwaway48476 3y ago
  Advertisers truly aren't people.
  • sangnoir 3y ago
    How do you support your livelihood, if it involves products or services, kindly share your sales funnel.
  • aspenmayer 3y ago
    Part of me agrees with you, but another part of me hesitates to dehumanize anyone, as that way lies madness. I'm reminded of the film They Live (1988). The protagonist, Nada, seeks a job at a construction site, as that is his trade. Due to the union, the foreman can only hire Nada as a day laborer, as Nada is not in the union. His way of life is gate-kept by powerful interests controlling the hiring process, and access to capital is constrained by these interests. By the time Nada obtains the sunglasses, he has already lost that job and is well down the path of becoming radicalized. Ironically perhaps, he first heard about the group producing the sunglasses when they hijacked the TV signals to essentially advertise their ideology. Once Nada acquires the glasses, he could be said to be enlightened, but I also view it as a sort of cautionary tale, considering how the film ends for Nada. Along the way, he sees through all of the ads, and in fact much of the surrounding content itself rings hollow for him. His actions are reminiscent of Ted Kaczynski in this context. Why didn’t he instead seek to join the union? Were the glasses actually what they purported to be, or were they a kind of rose-colored glasses that were designed to manipulate the wearer just like the advertisements did, but while making them believe they were seeing things more truly? Nada thought he was acting under his own agency before putting on the glasses, and yet he so readily trusted that he was still after putting them on, while adopting an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian ideology as part of an underground fringe group. Perhaps Nada was just tired of being part of the system, but by rage quitting as he did, we as the viewer are led to believe he goes out in a blaze of glory, but I view his exit to stage left thusly as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” to quote the Bard of Avon. There is no exit from capitalism that way, if there is any alternative at all if capitalist realism holds true, and Nada’s final line is perhaps an admission that he was himself used all along, and he was simply tired of scraping by and being in scrapes. He had gone down the path he was on as long as he was willing to go, and there was no way back, as he was already too far gone to come back. I’m reminded of the is/ought distinction, and I’d make a similar distinction between advertisements/content. Content is itself a similar kind of appeal to believe or think about concepts and ideals and ideas that come from outside ourselves. Due to the power of belief, capital seeks to gate-keep access to content, and advertising acts as a sort of escape hatch, blow-off valve, or side door through which access to those seeking content are able to be reached, accessible for a fee. It’s not exactly ideal, and not without its own hidden costs to the buyer or seller. Lack of capital is the conflict that leads to the crisis in Nada’s life, but I wish that his story had a happy ending. I feel that Nada was perhaps less free after putting on the sunglasses than he was before, as strange as that may sound. He fell for a classic blunder, believing that he actually was immune to advertising, rather than being sold an even bigger lie: that he could (only?) effect change through violence, that his life was no longer worth living.