DraftKings is using AI to behaviorally target chronic gamblers

You have many adtech online dossiers that are basically a virtual you, that can be poked, prodded and studied for interests and behaviors.

for a very minimal look, maybe check out amazon "about you":

https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1

  The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast

All the hard work of the people who suffered and fought to achieve this wisdom only for it to be abandoned.

Generations making the same mistakes over and over even with boundless knowledge at our fingertips. Really showcases how important education and especially reverence for education is.

Thing I sense is casino's actually depress local property values. You wonder if the taxes casino's generate don't cover the drop in property tax revenue.

I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq

Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.

And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.

Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.

The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.

The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job. Now this doesn't excuse you from doing any job but you also need to live.

Take the big tech companies. They're essentially military contractors now. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are functionally no different to RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.

But should you treat someone who works on Android the same as someone who works out on AI systems for military targeting? Probably not. Also, Palantir is fundamentally more evil than any of these tech companies. So it's tricky.

I do agree that online gambling as a whole is deeply unethical. There is no positive byproduct of this. Your salary is paid by people losing money, probably through addiction. And yes, you can say people have free will but you're still preying on and growing addiction.

People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.

Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?

I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.

Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?

Is it the % of people who show addictive tendencies to a piece of art/entertainment how we define if it is good or bad?

Is the morality of a form of entertainment defined by how many users show problematic consumption habits, such that in some populations an entertainment product is a moral good and in others it isn't? Is morality that flexible?

* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.

* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.

* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"

* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box

That leads us to BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab at Stanford and the addictive software design.

Tobacco industry owners figured out their time's out and bought food stock and put their addiction department to design food to be addictive.

Where should we head next?

In the 1980s, if you wanted to gamble in my city, you went to a gambling den operated by the Civella crime family. If you got caught in a police raid, your life was ruined. If you got behind on your debts, the mob might take it out of you, literally. These were known risks, but people did it anyways.

Then, in the 1990s, there was a change in the casino gaming laws. Casinos opened with harm reduction measures in place. You can absolutely destroy your finances for life in one, but there are ways out.

These apps need regulation like in-person gambling has. Whatever they currently have, it's not enough.

Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.

I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties

For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).

You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).

Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.

I think we could legislate some easy-to-understand, easy-to-enforce rules. Like, "you can't have more than N bets open at a time." (1?) Or, "you can't have more than $1,000 worth of bets open at a time."

True, addicts could skirt these rules by having different bets on different sites. But at least it would add a little friction, and it would be easy to monitor compliance.

This is a real question/comment, not a snarky one. When a libertarian says "people should be allowed", it seems to me to only mean "individuals". Because when "people", through their government, "make their own choices" collectively, this seems to be where libertarians get worked up.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/opinion/nba-commissioner-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/20/business/sports-betting-l...

This goes back to the trolley problem. I'm part of society, and I'm not to blame in any way for this; I had nothing to do with it.

Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.

While you don't appear to be susceptible, it is notable that this mindset is not something that makes you less likely to develop a gambling problem. It's actually part of how they drive addiction. A customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets, trying to get the winning high back.

As someone with years of experience in this industry, only a fraction of a percent of gamblers actually meet this defination. But they all think they're net winners and write off losses as "incremental"

That "live in a place with possibility" surely triggers the anticipation part of dopamine (which is what it really is, more so than the pleasure part). Dopamine is also intimately connected to movement: i.e. the shakes for people with neurological conditions as well as addicts going through withdrawal or about to relapse.

Haven't followed all that closely for some other games, but it very much seems like the model for NBA2k is to release a new game with some minor patches each year, charge 70$, then spend the majority of that year crafting patches for the card game to keep whales interested in constantly spending on new packs(which are promptly devalued on the next release, and straight up killing the prior year's game's online service, makes them entirely worthless the next year).

The retailers still have every incentive to sell as many lottery tickets as people will buy, because that's how they make a sizable portion of their money.

And the gambling addiction hotlines are too little too late. I've known people who struggled with gambling. They never admitted they had a problem until they had bottomed out. At that point I doubt the lotteries and casinos particularly care because that well's already run dry, anyway.

If the gaming industry really wanted to put their money where their mouth is on this one, they'd figure out ways to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place. Putting limits on how much money anyone person can lose, even if only at a single establishment, is one idea that wouldn't even be hard to implement. But of course we won't see that because, unlike gambling addiction hotlines, that runs the risk of reducing their profits.

Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.

Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.

It's pretty wild that we let it be advertised and boggles my mind that pro leagues jumped on the train.

Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?

As an example, if anybody tells you their commute to work is 25 minutes, it's more likely 45 minutes. "It takes me 10 minutes to get to X" really means 20. I don't know what it is but people just don't get this right.

It's way worse when it comes to money. "My income is $X" literally means "My income is 0.3X to 0.7X". I need to see employment contracts and W2s before I believe you what you say about your salary. People will even lie anonymously (eg on surveys). It's like they need to believe it themselves.

So when you say you have friends who net win hundreds of dollars, unless you've seen P&Ls, I don't believe them. And I'm sure these sites don't make it easy to figure out your total P&L because then you might stop. People will remember and boast about their wins and downplay or just plain forget their losses. They'll minimize losses and exaggerate wins. It's just human nature.

Ever notice how no gambler says they consistently lose? Everyone is somehow a winner? Isn't that sus?

0. https://beaconlights.org/sermons/a-deck-of-cards

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68367

https://prospect.org/2026/07/07/economic-hit-men-for-gamblin...

It's a side effect of liberty that people can choose to put themselves into deep suffering. I know people who do the same by blowing all of their money on designer clothes or expensive cars. Nobody is talking about regulating poor people wasting money on those things.

If you earn the money, you're entitled to piss it away. Them's the breaks.

This is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.

You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.

We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.

We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.

We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.

We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.

We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.

Also, on a semi-related note - there is the legality of gambling, the legality of running a gambling operation, and the legality of doing so for pecuniary gain, and it is possible for just part of these three to be illegal.

It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.

The list is far longer than you've mentioned.

Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...

In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.

Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.

Your morals have nothing to do with what others do with their own body.

Probably. We don't call it prostitution anymore it's now called, "sex work."

It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.

"Coined in 2010 by user design specialist Harry Brignull, the term 'dark patterns' has been used to describe design practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm."

Not sure if this reference to a definition is the same thing as saying it's the legal definition, but this is at least in a document as /a/ definition on the Federal Trade Commission's website.

Are you asking me to see how this mechanism applies to this definition?

Per the EFF link, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/draftkings-using-ai-su... : "Once found, DraftKings sends these customers targeted advertising designed to lure them back to the site to place more bets—bets that DraftKings thinks will be losing ones."

A good analogy might be asking if a restaurant has any "specials."

I've read that some unscrupulous restaurants will make the "special" whatever is not so fresh and they want to get rid of. And for some restaurants, that might mean something that is really starting to go rotten. Something no amount of sauce or spices will redeem it. In fact, just about anything else on the menu would be better.

But a scrupulous restaurant will make the "special" something that is really, well, special. A new recipe they just perfected and the ingredients are actually especially fresh and in season. And its because of these scrupulous restaurants that people still ask what the specials are.

A promo at a gambling site might actually be presented because they want you, the user, to have a good time. It could be ambivalent to whether you are doing good or bad at betting. These are "specials" that are actually special.

And, in fact, I think most people would prefer it was ambivalent. You almost certainly wouldn't like to know the site is happy in the fact that you lost money on your bets and now hopes you lose even more. Can you imagine if DraftKings said "Congratulations! You seem exactly like the kind of sucker and compulsive gambler that makes us the most money! Since you are losing so much money, we are giving you a promo on this bet that we think you are especially likely to lose money on! The more you lose the more we win! Please lose more by clicking here!" Since there is no such language, this is the rotten fish "special."

Similarly, social media's algorithms /could/ give make most prominent the posts that make you happiest and most contented. This would be "specials" that are special.

But we know they don't. They make prominent that which will make you angry and isolated and sad. They know this, and they don't put "PROMOTED: We think you'll hate this, and we want you to see it, because we think the more miserable you are, the more you'll use us!" This is the rotten fish "special."

It's all Dark Patterns. No new laws needed. "Just" enforcement.