Whether you want to accept it or not, AI is becoming a greater part of the daily lives of most modern human beings. Chat GPT is just one of the most recent booms in the AI industry, and it’s made headlines in no time. Educators are using AI as an admin to assist them with their teaching duties, it is used in self-driving vehicles to recognise our faces when we open our phones, or when the police are looking for a suspect on the run. It is used in healthcare for early disease detection, and in games, it is the NPCs that your character will interact with.
AI appears in video games as well as casino games, for example, when you’re relaxing with some online slots UK. It’s used in obvious ways, like the NPCs and random number generators that these games rely on, but also, increasingly, in ways that aren’t so easy to detect.
The question of ethics that has always accompanied the development and use of true AI technology is present in the worlds of mobile gaming and gambling as well. Anywhere that money is involved, all parties want to know that everything is fair and above board. Since AI is not human intelligence, it doesn’t come with a human conscience to help it know right from wrong. Can the widespread use of AI in mobile casinos and video gaming ever truly be ethical, and if so, how do we keep it that way? Let’s check out the details.
AI in Android mobile games
AI is used in mobile gaming in these significant ways:
- NPCs or non-player characters
- Pathfinding
- Decision-making
- Data mining
- Procedural content generation
- Player experience modelling
Most of these are pretty simple to understand, and for the most part, it’s clear that a lot of these applications can easily remain fair and above board. In NPCs, AI functions to give them a “personality” of sorts so they don’t seem to fake or out of place. Pathfinding gets you from point A to point B in a game: AI is used to generate an environment based on your movements or to generate an environment as you move.
AI in decision-making has a far bigger impact on the outcome and, thus, the fairness of the game. In some games, NPCs’ behaviour and interactions with you could vary depending on whether or not you have bloodstains on your clothes, for example. These interactions add up to influence your path through the game and can be manipulated by a skilful player or tweaked to one direction or the other by a developer.
Data mining is an area of much contention these days. AI collects information from everything players do in a game and uses that information to understand how players play, which quests or areas are preferred and which are not, etc. By doing this, AI can mould the player experience by trying to understand how they like or dislike certain aspects of the game, which can lead to targeted marketing, which is another area of ethical contention.
AI in casino games
AI in mobile casino games like slots, blackjack, and roulette has a lot of the same applications as it does in the world of video games:
- Data mining
- Procedural content generation
- Player experience modelling
Since online casino games are more financially motivated than most video games, there are other areas it can be utilised too:
- Fraud detection and prevention
- Player protection and security
Stakes are higher financially speaking when players are playing games of chance with the express understanding that they have a chance of winning cash rewards. AI used in casino gaming needs to be monitored with the strictest possible rules to ensure that players can win their games and that their personal and financial information is guarded against unapproved use.
AI works to ensure that each gamer’s experience is personally tailored by using approved data mined from the games they play, how long they play them for, etc. The algorithms work similarly to those included in social media like Instagram, where your historically favourite content is placed higher up on your feed.
AI is also used in online casinos to help players get the assistance they may need or to make the customer service experience faster and smoother. Instead of human staff being deployed for smaller concerns, AI is set up to handle the issue as far as possible. This leaves the human staff free to tackle more complicated or more important issues.
Conclusion
Human beings often respond to things they don’t completely understand with a measure of fear. That fear is a response designed to keep us safe, so it’s understandable that we’re concerned. Though there is a lot of conflict surrounding AI at the moment, if AI remains within its current bounds and is monitored strictly according to the laws of the land in question, there’s no reason to be anything but thankful for the weight that AI can take off our shoulders.
