Abstract
The rise of artificial intelligence in recent years has had a profound impact on a variety of fields.
It has had effects ranging from turning a company that was once best known for high-level graphics cards — NVIDIA — into the world’s most valuable company in June and creating a crisis in the world of academia.
For quite some time the growth and importance of AI was relatively opaque to the public, but it has taken a prominent role in the zeitgeist in part due to the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI that is widely available for free.
With AI garnering so much attention — and improving at a rapid rate — many industries are considering the benefits and drawbacks of its usage. The gambling industry is no exception as AI has the potential to play a significant role in how gaming operators interact with their customers, and how bettors interact with them.
This research investigates the pros and cons of AI usage in the legal betting industry, and how this technology changes the field.
Introduction
Before we dive into the positives and negatives associated with AI in the betting space, it’s worth acknowledging that there is a value judgment connected to those labels.
While our goal is to provide objective information about gambling, when we discuss pros and cons we are doing so from a pro-consumer standpoint.
For example, there is a case to be made that the type of advanced personalized advertising AI could assist with is a positive because it encourages more betting and higher profits for sportsbooks and casinos.
However, at RG.org we do not perceive an outcome like that as a positive because of the way it could promote problem gambling and exploit those with addictions.
As a result, below you will generally find positives to mean things that benefit bettors and promote safe and responsible gambling and negatives to mean the opposite.
Responsible Gambling Interventions
Perhaps the best thing AI can do to improve the gambling industry is to identify problem gamblers based on their betting history or customer support logs and help them receive the help they require.
In one Swedish study, for instance, (Auer et al, 2020) researchers were given access to a dataset of 7,134 gamblers whose gambling behavior was tracked by a behavioral feedback system that sent them personalized messages that encouraged responsible gaming practices based on rules and machine learning algorithms.
The study found that these messages based on behavior such as high losses, increased deposits, and greater gambling duration had a significant impact on behavior in the immediate term.
In total, 65% of players reduced their gambling activities on the day they read a message and 60% reduced their betting seven days after the message. The effect was slightly reduced for players the tracking tool classified as ‘high-risk’, but still potent.
Another means for responsible gambling intervention with AI assistance is examining customer service interactions to find indicators of problem gambling.
Using a Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count tool to evaluate 1008 emails researchers (Haefeli et al 2014) found that automated text analysis could be predictive of gambling issues leading to self-exclusion.
This LIWC evaluated interactions on a number of scales relating to word usage, and found a few that were related to problem gambling behavior. For instance, words that showed up on its anger and time scales were positively predictive of future self-exclusion, while causation was negatively predictive.
Considering the massive volume major betting companies have with customers — and the time-consuming nature through emails and chat logs manually — automatic text analysis could be a helpful tool for problem gambling interventions.
That said, at the time of the study the LIWC was still found to be “inferior to a human assessors” and it will likely take both a combination of AI analysis and human intervention to achieve the best outcomes.
References
Nick has been fascinated with sports since he was first taken to a Toronto Maple Leafs game back in 1998, and he's written about them professionally since 2014.
Nick has covered baseball and hockey for outlets like The Athletic, Sportsnet, and Yahoo Sports, and his sports betting expertise has grown since its legalization in Ontario in 2022.
Between 2022 and 2023 he worked for a betting startup called NorthStar Bets, and in 2024 he contributed to Oddspedia before joining the Responsible Gambling team.