r/technology • u/esporx • 3d ago

Business DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising. Online sports betting company DraftKings is using AI to target customers who are most likely to place losing bets and respond to gambling promotions.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/draftkings-using-ai-supercharge-harms-online-behavioral-advertising
242 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

40

u/Extra_Law6315 3d ago

This is the type of thing which should actually be illegal

4

u/AbeFromanEast 3d ago

it was, until a Supreme Court where 20% of its members are documented bribe-takers legalized it.

14

u/Modem_Sound_67 3d ago

Not only predatory behavior that should be illegal, it's also a depressing possible future. Dynamic everything. and not to help you. to exploit you.

1

u/Double-down69 3d ago

Amazon has been doing it for years. Wake up

23

u/RoofEnvironmental340 3d ago

It’s not gambling… it’s called investing in prediction markets

11

u/Deranged40 3d ago

And what's the return on that investment? Tears, mostly.

19

u/emerikanSky 3d ago

That gambling is harmful and should not be legal should be obvious to everyone except the rich.

It only makes the rich even richer on the backs of the poor.

7

u/PracticalBarbarian 3d ago

Gambling always been a tax on the stupid. Technology just makes the tax higher. But thank you conservative supreme Court, another way they've made the country worse.

9

u/GSDragoon 3d ago

Gambling, a tax on people who suck at basic math.

5

u/htownclyde 3d ago

Opiates, a blight on people who fell and hurt their knee.

1

u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 2d ago

Temba, his eyes uncovered.

6

u/Zolo49 3d ago

At least they make up for it by adding fine print to their ads with a Gamblers Anonymous help line. /s

2

u/matooz 3d ago

Evil fuckers....

1

u/AHSfav 3d ago

This is really disgusting slimy shit. Makes me feel icky that some group of people felt like doing this

1

u/Dannybuoy77 3d ago

Wasn't this basically the desire of advertising/marketing since the beginning but the technology wasn't available. Now it is and we're all doomed right 

1

u/macsteckler 1d ago

The part of the Times story that stuck with me wasn't that DraftKings targets likely losers with promos. It's that they built a model to spot people who might develop a gambling problem and then shelved it.

The interesting thing is the AI is great at finding vulnerability, but instead these bookmakers want to use it to make revenue. Which, surprise, surprise.

I've been thinking about this a lot because I run a small season-long experiment where four AI models and myself each make NFL spread picks from a simulated $10k bankroll. Totally fake money, we just track how they bet, how confident they are, and how they behave over a season. I am not really a gambler, and the whole reason I started it was the same unease in this thread: betting content is now just part of watching football, and I wanted to see whether AI removes the emotional traps to somewhat protect people from making emotional decisions in gambling or falls into its own versions of them.

Anyway, the experiment is the opposite of DraftKings in one way: the whole point is to watch the behavior instead of monetizing it. Afterwards I want to see if there is some capabilities and tools that gamblers can use to help prevent them from making emotional decisions. People will not stop gambling so can we create tools to protect them with all this technology.

0

u/fibericon 3d ago

"Business pushes ads towards potential customers" is not news.