Generative AI has made waves recently, following the public launch of services like ChatGPT and ElevenLabs. Becoming a phenomenon overnight, these AI platforms captured the imagination of people all over the world and started a lot of speculation about AI’s capabilities.
Considering other innovations like augmented reality and the metaverse, these AI platforms open up the possibility of advanced customer-facing services. Today we’re looking at one of the most social roles out there – the friendly casino dealer.
How Generative AI Works
Using training data, generative AI can mimic certain qualities while creating new content in its style. With that understood, a hypothetical AI dealer wouldn’t play the game for you or give you an advantage over the game.
Baccarat would be a great example since they just draw cards for the player or bank hands, then give payouts. The so-called banker is not the dealer, who is an observer. It’s a practical role that frees up a lot of time for interaction, especially if you already know how to survive at the baccarat table. An AI bot could be trained to do this but, without sufficient communication skills, it could fall short of real human communication. Nobody wants to be distracted between baccarat rounds by an AI bot caught in a conversation loop.
The training data can be images, audio, or text, with the dealer focusing on the latter. This has already been done with art, voices, and text styles, including the styles of long-dead authors. Since these AI are typically plugged into parts of the Internet, their training data is virtually limitless.
The goal of generative AI is essentially rampant personalization. This means that there will always be those who want living human dealers instead of a machine, due to distrust or lack of quality conversation with AI alternatives.
AI & The Metaverse
A big step towards AI dealers is through the metaverse. That’s the idea of a virtual reality that is accessible to most, typically with elements of an in-world economy. These have existed with certain projects for decades with limited success. However, the widespread adoption of digital currencies and assets would make this more feasible than ever before.
Some casinos have already started accepting cryptocurrency and the like, and there are fledgling casinos operating in the metaverse. The idea is that the casino would be a fully rendered digital space where you can traverse with an avatar, sharing the floor with others. The dealers would be humans operating a similar avatar, AI bots, or perhaps a mix of both as AI bots cover when humans aren’t available.
Why AI Dealers May Not Work
As stated, the main draw of generative AI is that it allows for personalization on a scale never seen before. That works for many environments, though interfacing with a dealer is less social if the users aren’t using VR and/or metaverse implementation. Modern generative AI can also misunderstand emotion or make basic factual errors, which is something that needs to be stamped out in the future.
Once established, AI is also largely automated and can be active 24/7. Sourcing and storing generative models that are packed with conversation data could be expensive for smaller projects, however. Generative AI innovator OpenAI has succeeded thanks to a lot of funding. Their competitors are industry giants like Google and its generative AI platform, DeepMind.
As generative AI continues to advance and improve, there’s no telling where its place is in our future. At present, there are a lot of prerequisites that would need to occur before AI dealers truly reap the benefits of generative AI technology.
