AI Weekly Malaysia

An EFF Deeplinks post (by Devanshi Nishar, dated September 24, 2026) reports, citing the New York Times, that DraftKings trains a machine learning model on customers' betting records to identify gamblers likely to place losing bets, then sends those customers targeted promotions to lure them back to place more bets. EFF frames this as an extreme case of online behavioral advertising and argues that all behavioral advertising should be banned. The Hacker News thread drew 365 points and 240 comments.

Why: This is a concrete example of the label choice doing the harm, not the model: the training signal is customers' own betting records, and the optimization target is 'will place losing bets,' which is why people flagged as problem gamblers get re-targeted. If you ship personalization or recommendation features, the useful takeaway is to name your model's target variable out loud — 'predicted revenue per user' can silently encode the same thing this article describes. Note the text contains no Malaysia- or Southeast Asia-specific detail, so any local regulatory angle would have to come from outside this source.

Pope Leo XIV posted on X on October 2, 2026 arguing there is an "ontological difference" between human art and machine output, which he described as "statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others" that lacks "the spark of humanity." The post follows a May encyclical letter on AI and human dignity, and TechCrunch cites a New York Times report that Anthropic has lobbied the Vatican to reconsider its position on non-human consciousness, apparently without success.

Why: Nothing in this changes what a builder can ship: no rule, API, price, or compliance requirement moves. The only concrete detail worth noting is the Anthropic lobbying item — a signal that major AI labs are spending effort on institutional legitimacy campaigns rather than purely technical ones. If you build generative image features, this is reputational context, not a decision input; there is no Malaysia or SEA angle in the text.