AI for Goodness (or Badness) Sake
Speed Read (Get the headlines here, and read on below)
· AI is changing sports as a business. We are already seeing countless innovative uses to improve player performance, fan experience, and more. There are downsides, however, that need to be explored and planned for.
· From a security and integrity perspective AI can be used for player protection both online and in the real world. New tools leveraging AI need to come to the market soon to keep up with threats.
· Betting platforms have a ton of compliance burdens and AI can certainly be leveraged here to manage costs and protect against abuse like money laundering and identity theft.
· Just using AI to counter known threats isn’t enough. New tech means new and more complex threats and AI should be used to identify and counter emerging risks.
· On balance I think AI will bring more good than bad to the sports industry but the stakeholders that will see the most success are the ones who will properly balance the opportunities against the risks and not solely focus on the good that AI can do.
· I’d love to see leagues take the step of creating a framework of baseline guardrails that teams should achieve to balance taking advantage of AI for their bottom line with the threats it poses.
The Full Story
AI seems like the topic everyone wants to talk about these days. It’s top of mind for government security officials, business executives, finance people, artists, writers, and health care workers. Oh, and Sports gamblers too. Like the athletes they bet on, sports gamblers are always looking for an edge—some additional bit of information that will leave them better informed than the rest of the market. Injuries, coming weather systems, a new offensive scheme, advanced analytics and more leave sharp bettors parsing information before they make their wagers. AI can certainly help with these decisions but are there other reasons we need to be looking at AI? And should we be looking at it skeptically or with open arms and open minds?
After the headlines from the past few weeks about Lance McCullers, Gabby Thomas, Jessica Pegula, and others a great place to start is using AI for player monitoring and protection. As I often like to mention, dual use technologies that can help a business’s bottom line and improve security are perfect options. There are a host of use cases here including monitoring betting markets for transactions by excluded parties, monitoring social media traffic for abusive content, or tracking social media for news to help sports books with odds placement. Some firms are already using AI for these tasks, which is great news. Signify AI is doing great work tracking social media content that harasses and threatens athletes and Sports Capital has impressive tools to track social media and open-source intelligence for sportsbooks and others. As technology improves these tools and others can go a long way toward using AI for good. Think about AI tools nudging social media users away from sending a threatening DM. Or alerting teams to trends in harassment as they develop online.
Compliance is another area where AI can definitely help. Different states have different laws about gambling, to say nothing of the different AI-related regulations, governance structures, and frameworks. Then there are anti-money laundering and “Know Your Customer” laws. Tools already exist to monitor the governance of an enterprise’s use of AI. That is to say you can designate which AI-related governance rules and laws you want to follow for your business and a tool will monitor how your AI models are using your data and can tell you when and where it is running afoul of the guardrails you’ve placed. This level of automation can help businesses confidently adopt AI tools while being able to visualize the safeguards they want and need to have.
With some of the good news out of the way there are also obviously new threat streams generated by AI. As Dr. Sam Hunter and others have put it, AI lowers the barrier to entry for malign actors (aka bad guys) to try new tools. If you need help writing code, producing a slick video or just generating ideas for your nefarious plans AI can be a real force multiplier. On top of that, AI-augmented wearables like glasses (or whatever thing OpenAI is building) can be distorted to use for your plot. We saw the homegrown terrorist in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve this past year do just that. He donned a pair of Meta’s AI-powered glasses to surreptitiously record surveillance footage to help plan his attack.
Unmanned systems like drones are another piece of technology that are becoming cheaper and smarter thanks to AI. They remain a persistent threat to sporting events as was laid out in a recent Senate hearing. We’ve seen low cost aerial drones wreak real havoc overseas in combat and insurgency situations, so it isn’t a far leap to expect that a terrorist here might try and use them. These may be extreme examples, but in the gambling context, unconstrained AI models can help malign actors manipulate gambling odds or markets. They could generate anonymized tools to harass athletes or coaches. Deep fakes could be used to covertly elicit insider information. They could make a lot of the disruptions we see now much easier and faster to achieve in addition to introducing novel threats.
As with any new technology there must be a balance. It’s tempting to look at a breakthrough like AI and focus only on a narrow band of benefits. It’s also tempting to think that the businesses that will come out ahead will be the enterprises who adopt fastest. I think the winners, when it comes to deploying and harnessing the power of AI, will be the ones who best understand its utility but also how its benefits might be corrupted or warped for malign use. Innovators across the spectrum, including in sports, are curious about new things—not scared of them. But you must be equally curious about the benefits as you are about the potential threats. The enterprises that see both sides of the coin will see business gains, will elicit trust from their customers, and will attain a measure of stability that others will only grasp at. AI is too powerful and too transformative to ignore one half of the equation. This is true in most applications, but I think it’s certainly so in the world of sports and sports gambling. I’d love to see leagues take a leadership role and lay out a public framework for how teams can balance pursuing the financial and business gains available from AI with the variety of threats AI can pose to sport integrity, fans, athletes and more.