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.
You can actually take most of the bullshit out of an "AI!!!!" headline by simply replacing "AI" with "computers".<p>"Artificial intelligence is being used to predict gambler behaviour" --> "computers are being used to predict gambler behaviour"<p>I think it's a lot more reflective of what's actually going on and removes a lot of the clickbaity hype...
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.
> “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.”<p>> 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.<p>Meanwhile, in the real world, hardly anyone clicks on a banner ad ever. A perfectly polished targeted turd is still a turd.
In a couple of weeks: "Revealed: how amazon uses AI to keep shoppers shopping" and then "Revealed: how pornhub uses AI to keep ..."
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.<p>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 <i>paid</i> (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.<p>But hey, I still refuse to get Amazon Prime, so what do I know about the average consumer behavior.
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.
Supercharging peoples addiction to their phones, an even bigger dopamine hit if there is a chance you might win money too.<p>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.
Sometimes I wonder is there new research in the world of advertising and AI?<p>Tracking clicks via heatmaps, pageviews etc has been done for ages. So, has AI/ML provided better ways to convert those ads?
the gambling industry pioneered a lot of the techniques now used for web sites, far earlier.<p>“time on device” is something they coined and started optimizing for decades ago.