Problem gambling is a major public health concern and is associated with profound psychological distress and economic problems. There are numerous gambling communities on the internet where users exchange information about games, gambling tactics, as well as gambling-related problems. Individuals exhibiting higher levels of problem gambling engage more in such communities. Online gambling communities may provide insights into problem-gambling behaviour. Using data scraped from a major German gambling discussion board, we fine-tuned a large language model, specifically a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, to predict signs of problem-gambling from forum posts. Training data were generated by manual annotation and by taking into account diagnostic criteria and gambling-related cognitive distortions. Using k-fold cross-validation, our models achieved a precision of 0.95 and F1 score of 0.71, demonstrating that satisfactory classification performance can be achieved by generating high-quality training material through manual annotation based on diagnostic criteria. The current study confirms that a BERT-based model can be reliably used on small data sets and to detect signatures of problem gambling in online communication data. Such computational approaches may have potential for the detection of changes in problem-gambling prevalence among online users.

As guests arrive at eastern Australia's Warilla Hotel, a small camera equipped with facial recognition software scans their faces as part of a scheme to tackle problem gambling. The tech – which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify addicts who have asked to be barred from betting sites – is set to be rolled out across gambling venues in the state of New South Wales next year. Supporters say it will help curb problem gambling in a country where the addiction affects about 1 percent of the population and annual losses run to billions of dollars. But the technology is "invasive, dangerous and undermines our most basic and fundamental rights", said Samantha Floreani, programme lead at the non-profit group Digital Rights Watch. "We should be exceptionally wary of introducing it into more areas of our lives and it should not be seen as a simple quick-fix solution to complex social issues," she said.

Loot boxes in video games will not be banned in the UK, despite a government consultation finding evidence of a "consistent" association between the features and problem gambling. Loot boxes have attracted comparison with gambling because they allow players to spend money to unlock in-game rewards, such as special characters, weapons or outfits, without knowing what they will get. The features, popular in games such as Call of Duty and the Fifa football series, were effectively banned in Belgium in 2018, but the culture minister, Nadine Dorries, said the UK would not follow suit. Instead, after a 22-month consultation, she said the government would discuss tougher "industry-led" protections with the UK's £7bn gaming sector, drawing allegations from one expert that "foxes are guarding the hen house". Legislating to impose curbs or a prohibition on loot boxes as part of an expected overhaul of the UK's gambling laws could have "unintended consequences", Dorries said.