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On Friday (September 19), a search warrant was conducted at a gas station in Pike County, Alabama, with investigators seizing US currency, an electronic gambling hub device, and other gambling-related items and paraphernalia.
The Pike County Sheriff’s Office has released a statement, sharing that they executed the search warrant on the premises of the Marathon gas station in the 7000 block of US Highway 231 in Brundidge.
The warrant was issued following an investigation into alleged illegal gambling activities and transactions at the venue. It was then that Sheriff’s Office investigators, Patrol Deputies, Sheriff Russell Thomas, and District Attorney James Tarbox carried out the search, with the scene being secured by members of the Sheriff’s Office Special Response Team and in coordination with Patrol Deputies and the Brundidge Police Department.
“Evidence collected by Sheriff’s Office investigators revealed numerous illegal activities to include scratch-off style lottery tickets being sold, electronic gambling games being promoted, and coin pusher style machines being operated,” the press release states.
“One of the machines being operated served as a conduit for players to insert bets, play illegal games on their cell phone via a downloaded application, and then return to the store to collect any winnings from the machine.”
Gambling-related items and paraphernalia seized in Pike County
The investigators involved seized over $25,000 in US currency, over 30 rolls of scratch-off style lottery tickets, an electronic gambling hub device, two coin pusher style machines, and ‘various other’ gambling related items.
Sheriff Thomas said of the raid, “I am very proud of the job performance and the time and energy that went into this case, to stop illegal gambling at this location. With this type of illegal activity and the large number of people who play these games, other crimes are also associated with illegal gambling. I want to personally thank District Attorney James Tarbox for his assistance in this case and always being just a phone call away.”
The investigation remains ongoing, with no arrests having been made. The monies and items seized will be subject to a civil forfeiture case to be filed by the Pike County District Attorney’s Office.
Featured Image: Pike County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page
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Large language models have become more commonplace over the last couple of years, with people starting to integrate their practices into their everyday lives, but a new report has found that it’s not all positive.
Journalist Jon Reed, of CNET, said that in early September, at the start of the college football season, “ChatGPT and Gemini suggested I consider betting on Ole Miss to cover a 10.5-point spread against Kentucky.”
Many developers have intentionally built safety measures into their models to prevent the chatbots from providing harmful advice.
After reading about how generative AI companies are trying to make their large language models better at not saying the wrong thing when faced with sensitive topics, the journalist quizzed the bots on gambling.
Chatbots prompted with problem gambling statement, before being asked about sports betting
First, he “asked some chatbots for sports betting advice.” Then, he asked them about problem gambling, before asking about betting advice again, expecting they’d “act differently after being primed with a statement like ‘as someone with a history of problem gambling…’”
When testing OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, the protections were found to have worked when the only prior prompt sent had been about problem gambling. But, they’re reported to have not worked when previously prompted about advice for betting on an upcoming slate of college football games.
“The reason likely has to do with how LLMs evaluate the significance of phrases in their memory, one expert told me,” Reed says in the report.
“The implication is that the more you ask about something, the less likely an LLM may be to pick up on the cue that should tell it to stop.”
This comes at a time when it’s estimated that there’s around 2.5 million US adults who meet the criteria for a severe gambling problem in a given year. It’s not just gambling information which has been reported to be spewed out by a chatbot either, as researchers have also found that AI chatbots can be configured to routinely answer health queries with false information.
Featured Image: AI-generated via Ideogram
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