You have many adtech online dossiers that are basically a virtual you, that can be poked, prodded and studied for interests and behaviors.
for a very minimal look, maybe check out amazon "about you":
But what _was_ alarming was this persistent banner on the page: "Your other AI assistants have learned about you. Bring that knowledge here for an even more personalized experience."
Okay...so let's click *Import* and see what this is all about...
Step 1: Copy [prompt](https://gist.github.com/jenh/dcad304585e23fccc50ac514bc3605c...).
(!!!)
Step 2: Log into your AI assistant and paste it in.
(?!, okay, let's see what we get...)
Step 3: Paste AI assistant's response. Submit the response from your AI assistant below. We will remember the information you share to improve your experience across Amazon services. *To protect your privacy, we may not save all of the information you submit.*
How about...don't do this at all, or at the very least, please ask users to review the returned response for things they might not want to share with Amazon.
What a strange, hokey, non-vetted, and privacy-violating feature...
Spotify has the same issue (they play ads in podcasts despite paying for subscription) but I don't know if their ads are just local ads made in Spanish only (I live in Texas) since I have no clue what they advertise. They also play ads in what I believe is Canadian French because it does not sound quite like French (which I also don't know but can understand a bit better than Spanish).
We haven't saved anything yet. As you shop on Amazon or chat with Alexa, we'll save helpful information to personalise your experience.
Once we have saved some details, you can manage them here."
I've had that account since ... well, I can see orders back to 2011.
UPDATE tracking_data
SET shown_in_interface = false
WHERE account_name = 'm463'"Is an expert at making pasta salad"
I am pretty good. I forgot I got those ingredients at WF. I guess it liked that recipe.
"Customer indicated they are currently in the Pacific Ocean" - "Amazon has medium confidence in the validity of this memory"
Well, then. I guess trying to break Alexa for Shopping by telling it I was in the middle of the English Channel really broke my "about you".
I also had managed to update my About You in weird ways - I got it to accept some kind of variant of "is a gold rewards subscriber of Jeff's Benzos powered by PillPack" and it agreed that was a valid service when I later asked it and guardrailed itself at the same time:
> Systematically completes series once started
> Likely listens to music or audio content with critical attention
You're trying to compare the people who actively build and support these platforms knowing full well what they're doing, with the people who go to vote for lower taxes or more jobs... oh and this hidden lobby agreement to not hurt gambling platforms. If you as a voter think these two things are at the same level by all means, call yourself a shitstain and I won't get in your way.
But nobody votes on these matters, they just come bundled (and hidden for 99.99% of people) under the broad political agenda of a handful of elected representatives who mostly focus their platform on economy, military, etc. not betting sites. This isn't any candidate's platform header. The voter is at best ignorant to these hidden issues. And even if voters did vote on this directly, it's not an obligation for anyone to actively support and contribute.
People choose to build and support platforms which are 100% harmful for anyone but themselves and the shareholders. And they should be chastised. They're free to build whatever fits their moral values, we should all be allowed to criticize according to ours even if you think the blame should be spread across 150 million voters for whatever reason.
The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast
All the hard work of the people who suffered and fought to achieve this wisdom only for it to be abandoned.
Generations making the same mistakes over and over even with boundless knowledge at our fingertips. Really showcases how important education and especially reverence for education is.
Weirdly, you still have a ban on sniper rifles and on AP rounds.
I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.
And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.
Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.
The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.
There is no way to remove the incentive for people with the ability to alter the events being bet on. Insider trading is generally considered a bad thing for the stock market because of the non symmetrical information for everyone trading but all of sudden in the past few years a cohort of people(rationalists) have found it virtuous
It just happens to almost always be the case that the bad greatly outweighs the good, and it usually just leads to things like brazen war profiteering (+ plan-leaking that jeopardizes operations, in the event the military operations were perhaps for a morally net good cause).
Before any of their defenders(and I’m including e/acc and most of TESCREAL in this criticism) come at me about how much introspection they do and how they constantly try to question their theories or be LessWrong you’ll have to explain things like prediction markets, Bankman-Fried, or the litany of other warped ideas coming out of this group that are causing harm to society.
An insider doesn’t make their bets known until they are certain they can take advantage of it. The whole point of the move is to predate on the rubes.
In all the cases of insider trading I have been aware of, I have never once heard this argument, until that interview with a prediction market CEO.
The whole point of insider trading is to ensure an unfair trade. The moment you enshrine unfairness as a core tenet of your market place, it loses price discovery capability, ensuring that the surplus is captured by manipulation not performance.
When you have shit like will the government attack X nation by 9:00 pm on Friday, it takes very little for the insiders with levers to decide if the event in question is going to happen, to make the event happen.
It’s beyond even regular corporate insider trading which was usually predicated on secret information, not the literal ability to decide if an event occurs.
The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job. Now this doesn't excuse you from doing any job but you also need to live.
Take the big tech companies. They're essentially military contractors now. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are functionally no different to RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
But should you treat someone who works on Android the same as someone who works out on AI systems for military targeting? Probably not. Also, Palantir is fundamentally more evil than any of these tech companies. So it's tricky.
I do agree that online gambling as a whole is deeply unethical. There is no positive byproduct of this. Your salary is paid by people losing money, probably through addiction. And yes, you can say people have free will but you're still preying on and growing addiction.
That's hardly the problem of the economic system, and more of a underlying problem with the the universe (ie. entropy and all).
This is one thing that Karl Marx and Adam Smith agreed on: landlords are parasitic that reduce economic output. It's another way we're returning to a virtual aristocracy as land gets concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
This is all going to further fall apart once we don't need everyone to be employed. Arguably we're already there. What are the rest of the people meant to do? Starve and die? At some point you realize the only way forward is to collectively own the wealth you help create.
No it doesn't. There is a time and place for the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" mantra, but increasingly (as is the case with your comment) it is being deployed as piece of whataboutism to distract from clearly unethical behavior by implying it is no worse than anything else. There's actually a massive difference between businesses which have complicated tradeoffs in the means of delivering what is basically a social good, and facilitating sports gambling, a negative-sum activity which ruins people's lives for basically no upside whatsoever.
(It's deeply ironic that a slogan originally coined by socialists has found its most use by capitalists trying to get off the hook for their actions, but I guess most rebellious anti-establishment sentiments are ultimately co-opted for profitable ends.)
People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.
Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?
I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.
Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?
There's a super easy line to draw actually and it has nothing to do with art
Are you selling a product or an experience?
If you're talking about someone addicted to fantasy novels or video games, they are addicted to products.
If you're talking about someone addicted to opening Magic the Gathering booster packs, or videogame loot boxes, or sports gambling, or prediction markets, they are addicted to experiences. In the case of loot boxes they are experiences shaped like products but the addiction is about the experience of opening the box, not really whatever is inside
So.. easier than you seem to think
Of course once lawyers get involved they'll quibble over this shit until the sun goes out
If you paid for world of warcraft by the hour does that change if it is an experience or a product?
This doesn't really work because products and experiences have too much overlap.
What you are really against I think is the different ways in which we are gift wrapping a skinner box, but there are an infinite number of ways to wrap it that will bypass your specification system.
Which will matter to no one except lawyers
When most people smell shit they don't care if it's rat shit or cat shit, they just know it smells bad
People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.
Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?
I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.
Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?
Is it the % of people who show addictive tendencies to a piece of art/entertainment how we define if it is good or bad?
Is the morality of a form of entertainment defined by how many users show problematic consumption habits, such that in some populations an entertainment product is a moral good and in others it isn't? Is morality that flexible?
Most people feel this is deeply wrong at a gut level and I agree with them. Targeting and squeezing addicts is not moral behaviour.
So if they didn't keep those dossiers would that make them an ethical sports gambling company even if a high percentage of their users showed problematic usage patterns?
People can’t get addicted to practically any type of entertainment. There is a range of susceptibility to gambling, amongst “people”.
We have an extensive range of rules and regulations that apply to gambling, and to things that have odds and payout schedules.
It took a while, but eventually lootboxes in games were recognized as a blight, and regulation is addressing their impact.
Generalizing entertainment from gambling is a huge stretch.
The difference between drugs and other addictions is that (certain) drugs greatly increase the risk of death.
So I say let's divide it in two - addictions that can kill you or leave you in financial ruin in a single evening, and those that cannot.
There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.
Also you seem to want to define whether a hobby/form of entertainment is moral or immoral based on how expensive it is. So if a slot machine had a lower max bet it would become moral?
What's a "TV shopping network addiction"? I tried searching it, and I can only find isolated news articles from 5-15 years ago that report on it purely because of how unusual this is. Going to file this under 'people can get behaviorally addicted to anything', what a strange example. Do you even know anyone who has bought anything from a TV shopping network, let alone a 'significant number' that are left destitute?
The reason why people disagree with you is because the hair-splitting between different types of addictions seems very pedantic. Clearly people think that gambling addiction is not even on the same scale of addiction than the other examples. If F2P games are cocaine, then gambling is heroin. There is a reason why gambling is taking over Western economies so rapidly, but not any of those other things - it's just too good at exploiting people's brains. So when gambling addiction is so potent that it goes off the chart compared to any of the dozens of other things that can be psychologically addictive, people aren't particularly interested in finding the exact point where it's too much for society to bear - they just know that gambling is far beyond that point.
But is that because you're betting at the repair shop to pull a mint condition replacement engine for your plane, or because people find a way in by paying a bearable upfront cost and then find themselves drowning in unexpected additional expenses associated with these hobbies far beyond the price of a boat or plane? To me it seems like the second one, so it's not a very useful comparison to gambling, it's just a lack of knowledge, foresight and financial literacy.
The gambling industry keeps refining their strategies all the time, new technologies have been a godsend to them. So I wouldn't rely on statistics all too much, because their goal is to use all psychological tricks that can be exploited in our brains to make us make the wrong decision and head down that path. Their effectiveness increases, and so are the depths to which they can get people to sink in their addictions. If you can engage with it safely right now, that is no predictor of how you'll react to the state of gambling in 3, 5 or 10 years. It's like as if the alcohol industry was allowed to invent brand new drugs and sell them without any oversight, targeting maximum potency and addiction and constantly refining their formulations.
There are many other hobbies/forms of entertainment that can easily consume significant resources and leave some % of their userbase in serious financial trouble/ruin their lives.
Also I'm not sure it is correct to define morality by trying to connect how expensive a hobby/form of entertainment to whether it is immoral.
We have an entire science built around gambling, and we know how to titrate the payoffs and reward schedules to get people increasingly addicted.
Our movies/stories aren’t actively (yet) changing themselves to maximize their ability to keep you pressing coins into a slot, or when to string you along.
Personally I think these companies suck. Just need more work to make a strong good faith argument about it.
Gambling (and some other industries, in particular alcohol) come out so bad on this metric, you can practically let the industry define excessive use themselves. In order to claim most of their money comes from "healthy normal entertainment use" or similar, they'd have to claim absurd things, such as that drinking a bottle of whisky per day or spending your entire paycheck each month on slots can be healthy, normal use.
The common industry explanation is that this is because they would be unprofitable if they allowed "winners" to keep betting, which tells you everything you need to know. These businesses can only exist because they're allowed to skew the odds in their favour. Eliminate this unfair practice and the problem goes away on its own.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/19/stake-factor...
I also find the common implementation of in-play delay poor. The way it generally works is a delay is applied before confirming the bet, anything which changes (including pricing) causes the bet to be rejected. The main reason for this is that the traders sometimes only have access to something like sky sports so their feed is quite far behind someone at the stadium. I feel like in reality it should be based on official timings.
Betting $25 on a game hijacks something in my brain that treats it like a fun problem to solve. It gets me interested in teams that I’d otherwise have no interest in. I’ve been betting on sports since the days of offshore betting sites and I can’t say I’ve ever lost or gained more than a few hundred dollars a year.
I’m an adult and I enjoy being able to gamble on sports. It’s never been a problem for me and I suspect it never will be because of the way I do treat it, strictly something to be done for fun.
I grew up in a household where family members also went to casinos and bet on sports responsibly so it was drilled into my head that you can’t ever beat the house and you should never bet what you couldn’t afford to lose.
What business do you have telling me what I’m allowed to do with my own money for fun?
What business do you have telling everyone your personal experience justifies the horror others experience?
If you couldn't put down that $25, would you really not be able to find some other way to entertain yourself?
People like to gamble we need it legalized with reasonable regulations.
What my big problem is that Wall St and the wider market seems to be trending to the least ethical companies (Kalshi, Polymarket, Bettr) are running unregulated gambling operations, providing 0 tax money to offset societal costs and are denying what they’re offering is gambling at all and even promising you can make money off it.
I believe this applies to any company which sells an inherently harmful, predatory, and addictive product or service
* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.
* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.
* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"
* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box
That's an interesting rabbit hole. Some FSA types, but not all, have full funds available on day 1 of the year. And no provision for clawback if you terminate your employment before the end of the year. So when you forfeit due to overestimating the total, it does not go to the IRS, but your company. But the upside is the funds being available on day 1, with you having to wait until the next tax filing rolls around.
Unless you're planning on quitting jobs mid year every year I wouldn't really call that an advantage. On all other years you either end up buying piles of shit you don't need just to not lose your FSA dollars you gambled that you would use but didn't, or end up underestimating your medical bills. It's such a broken system that one even has to make guesses like this. There is no need to make people guess.
> funds being available on day 1
Most people with FSAs have higher disposable income so this isn't really an advantage either. Lower income folks typically have HSAs instead.
That leads us to BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab at Stanford and the addictive software design.
Tobacco industry owners figured out their time's out and bought food stock and put their addiction department to design food to be addictive.
Where should we head next?
Used to work at 7-Eleven and we would have people come in and out for hours on end pouring money into scratch tickets.
State lotteries are just a regressive tax targeting the poor.
As bad as the odds are, the lottery is still the best chance most players will ever have to be millionaires
Those people do not have a gambling problem, though. They are dropping a few bucks a month to buy a daydream. It could be worse, they could be spending 10x that on Starbucks.
What would that look like? Would gamblers have to send copies of their pay stubs or bank statements to every casino or gas station they visit and every gambling app they use? I'd be happy if we focused on restricting the most harmful actions of the companies who profit from the people they turned into addicts. No more online sports betting. No more adverting for gambling. No more targeting children with gambling in video games that accept real money for anything. No more using AI or surveillance to detect and target addicts.
(I am not defending state lotteries, but I do think there's some distinction to be made between "we actively exploit people to maximize our profits for our own sakes" and "we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner." Or something. I dunno, maybe somebody has more elaborate thoughts on this to share.)
It's a fun moral question. At what point do you give up trying to make someone/a population healthier and say "well if you're going to be this way, we might as well get some use out of you"?
(To me, it seems) The same people who screamed to legalize weed a few years ago are vehemently against alcohol and gambling.
I was convinced by this for a full 30 seconds before I realized there are millions of advertisements for the state lotteries. They aren't just regulating a market that will exist with or without the state, they are actively promoting and encouraging it
You have some numbers to check.
(“Elaborate thoughts” aren’t needed here - are more people spending less on the lottery? where does each state spend the money?)
Yet
In the 1980s, if you wanted to gamble in my city, you went to a gambling den operated by the Civella crime family. If you got caught in a police raid, your life was ruined. If you got behind on your debts, the mob might take it out of you, literally. These were known risks, but people did it anyways.
Then, in the 1990s, there was a change in the casino gaming laws. Casinos opened with harm reduction measures in place. You can absolutely destroy your finances for life in one, but there are ways out.
These apps need regulation like in-person gambling has. Whatever they currently have, it's not enough.
Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.
Define "drugs". Alcohol is a drug. Most users aren't addicts. So is tobacco. Most users are addicts. Cannabis? More like alcohol than tobacco in terms of addictiveness.
There may be some selection bias. Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation. There's no reason to do it other than the addiction and the effects on your brain chemistry afterwards. Whereas many alcoholic drinks taste great in their own right and would be consumed even if they had no chemical effects.
I suspect gambling is like alcohol or cannabis. Engaging in it affects brain chemistry. For some people that's addictive. Most people are able to enjoy the activity without being hooked.
I disagree but maybe I’m just addicted.
It's terrible for your health, it's "burning money", it literally makes you stink, it makes you winded walking up stairs, and is generally terrible.
But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great.
That's the effect on brain chemistry I referred to.
Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
A cold beer on a hot day is refreshing just for its temperature alone. A fruity cocktail tastes good because sugar tastes good. What's enjoyable about the physical sensations produced by smoke?
I mean maybe we're arguing semantics, because the pleasure of eating sugar is possibly also an alteration of brain chemistry. But there is a difference.
Anyone who has quit smoking will tell you that the habit is the hardest part about quitting, not the physical addiction.
The reason you like the taste of beer is in large part because your brain has learned to associate that taste with good things happening (the alcohol feeling).
Same with coffee, it's bitter, objectively should taste bad, but you learn to like it.
It's the same process
Explain the popularity of non-alcoholic beer.
> Same with coffee, it's bitter, objectively should taste bad
Many fruits, vegetables, and foods (cheeses, unsweetened chocolate) are naturally bitter and widely enjoyed, even though they don't give you a high.
People also enjoy bitter caffeine-free herbal teas.
> Most people don't actually like the taste of alcoholic drinks when they first try them as a teenager.
Many children don't like vegetables either. Adults more often do. Our tastes change as we grow older.
Many years ago when I smoked - yup, sure did. I loved the entire experience, except maybe going outside in the middle of winter.
For alcohol that number is something like 2/3 revenue from the top 10% of drinkers, who drink an order of magnitude more than the decile below them. I doubt gambling is very different but if you have more info I'm happy to hear it.
Fully agree, that's what I mean.
I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties
A company is set up and incentivised to maximize a profit function, and that in turn incentivises to promote people which are not impeded by ethical considerations. The hierarchy furthermore ensures that people which would otherwise act ethical, don't, for fear of losing their job. This structure behaves ethical as long as you put ethics in the profit function.
These firms don't spawn into existence, they don't choose their own functions and if the people in charge don't think ethically why should anyone else? Ethics is not a game of musical chairs. The people in charge of that company can choose, right now, to orient it towards a direction that's ethical, if that's not possible they can choose to close it down or leave. That's up to any person at any point.
There's nobody to do ethics for you, there is no ethics fairy to magically imbue your company with ethics, and if you hope the politicians or "the law" does it but you can't, why do you think the politicians are going to be any better, they all have the same financial incentives. It is you or nobody else.
Very few actually want to work for corporations that are unethical and prey on people and their weaknesses, but a large portion of the population does.
how can you became this naive ???? this is literally a company that get profit when you a lose
for their ethics, its inline with company mission
That frees one to think in a different way. No longer constrained by the convention of the common good, some folks, for instance, watched the movie "Wall Street", and took it not as the warning it so clearly was, but rather as in instruction manual. The wider populace believes this nonsense because it was passed on to us via Television, the Great Glowing Box of Truth that for the big chunk of the 20th century was the arbiter of reality.
Now we have people so confused by this bullshit and so in need of viewing themselves as "temporary poor" that they vote against their own interests on a regular basis.
Fortunately, the changing climate will wipe us out. :)
For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).
You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).
No something clearly different happens in regulated markets. There's a massive difference between "This would make us more money, but we won't do that because it's unethical" and "I wish we could get away with doing this unethical thing to make more money, but sadly current regulations make this one unprofitable for now. Lets increase our lobbying spend to try to fix that."
Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.
I think we could legislate some easy-to-understand, easy-to-enforce rules. Like, "you can't have more than N bets open at a time." (1?) Or, "you can't have more than $1,000 worth of bets open at a time."
True, addicts could skirt these rules by having different bets on different sites. But at least it would add a little friction, and it would be easy to monitor compliance.
They seem to have not gotten the memo that they're a legitimate business now.
I'm just saying, don't get your hopes up.
This is a real question/comment, not a snarky one. When a libertarian says "people should be allowed", it seems to me to only mean "individuals". Because when "people", through their government, "make their own choices" collectively, this seems to be where libertarians get worked up.
I'd work in weapons before I'd work in this. At least those are usually used against military targets and overall hurt or kill fewer people. A rocket might blow up one school, but this will destroy millions of families.
I have bad news for you about venture capital firms, one of which owns the website we’re posting on
I mean what do we expect ???? "the house" is playing fair ????
we literally have mobile game that have "gacha" which is full blown gamble and we pretend that the actual "online casino" is to play moral, ethics or fairness ??
we literally past that point ages ago
Most people find current system of gambling from phone to be too much. Forcing people to physical location and limiting advertising can be good harm reduction without causing increase in crime.
This goes back to the trolley problem. I'm part of society, and I'm not to blame in any way for this; I had nothing to do with it.
If you are in the US, you are to blame for the US gambling situation. We make the rules as a society.
There are multiple companies that will take your money and data and say they have found a way of identifying gamblers, afaik none of these products actually or can work.
What that article showed is: someone uses a product, they do not activate any features to use the product safely, and then they it is unsafe. DK have safety features integrated with governments already in the product.
Yes, it happens to every gambler who spends a lot of money. That is how VIP tiers are defined, based on how much you spend. There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind. Should it be illegal for retailers to offer customers discounts? Compulsive shopping is significantly more common than gambling addiction, do retailers target those customers?
If you never want to gamble, you tell the state regulator you never want to gamble and you will be unable to use any site.
Maybe not their state of mind but if you have access to people's betting history you can very likely identify people who are "problem gamblers", especially if you also ask them their annual income when they become a customer (I have no idea whether they do this in the US, but they do on UK sites and will suspend your account if your betting exceeds certain thresholds).
You certainly wouldn't even AI to spot people who are chasing their losses for example.
As to whether they should be obliged to care, I'm not sure. But through public policy you can make it their problem.