best known for its sports betting<\/a> app, built an AI model to determine which customers were likely to gamble and lose the most money in response to its enticing promotions, according to numerous former employees, some of whom helped build the machining learning algorithm. It predicts which gamblers could lose the most, scoring them based on a trove of their personal habits. A high score meant that a gambler was more likely to lose more money on each promotion DraftKings offered to keep them gambling.<\/p>\nJayden Butts, a former data analyst at the company who tested the AI model, described the initiative to the NYT. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are looking for traits and features that we can target that indicate a good investment,\u201d he told the newspaper. By strict financial logic, the \u201cbest investment would be a problem gambler.\u201d<\/p>\n
When you\u2019re a chronic gambler, you only have so much money to lose. DraftKings, though, tried to bring users back into the fold by bombarding them with promotions that promised \u201cfree\u201d bets, a deposit bonus, or a \u201cprofit boost.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blasting these promotions out randomly isn\u2019t a smart strategy. That\u2019s where the AI model comes in: to find the biggest gambling addicts who\u2019ll fall for these offers hook, line, and sinker.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is as predatory as it sounds,\u201d a different former data analyst who quit DraftKings in 2024 told the NYT. \u201cIf you lose more, we give you more, so you keep playing more.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
DraftKings began its efforts to build a model predicting how promotions would translate into a customer\u2019s wins or losses in mid-2023, per the reporting. The driving question behind it, according to Butts, was whether \u201cthis person going to give us more than we\u2019re giving them?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd if the answer is yes,\u201d he added, \u201copen the floodgates.\u201d<\/p>\n
The level of data surveillance, ethics aside, is impressive. Documents showed that DraftKings analyzed how frequently gamblers played, their daily account balances, and compared how much they lost to how much they bet. It also used another model that predicted how likely a customer was to stop gambling. One employee said he worked on a system that identified customers who were at risk of quitting the platform and tried bring them back.<\/p>\n
That trove of data could also be put to more ethical means: finding problem gamblers and intervening. <\/p>\n
But employees who tried to develop a model to help addicts say their efforts were quashed. One of them, Nestor Hernandez, started building a system to find vulnerable gamblers and assigning them a risk score, which the company could use to warn or even ban the customer before their losses spiraled. But the project was canned in 2025 just months after he left the company. Jake Shannin, who stayed working on the project until it was shut down, said the team was scheduled to present their model to DraftKing\u2019s chief responsible gaming officer Lori Kalani, but their presentation was suddenly cancelled on the day it was supposed to take place.<\/p>\n
DraftKings, in a statement to the NYT, rejected \u201cany implication that its marketing practices are unfair or improperly targets customers.\u201d Kalani, meanwhile, insisted to the paper that the company leadership made a \u201ccollective decision\u201d not to use predictive models for identifying problem gambling because the technology \u201cwasn\u2019t evidence-based.\u201d<\/p>\n
More on gambling: Sports Betting Site Boasts That It\u2019s Letting Users Bet on Little League Players<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up to see the future, today Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":609382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[134,554,555,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-609381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}