FAQ: AI, Pirates and Plans

AI

I don’t want to become a Luddite and deny an inevitable future. I also don’t want to dive into the principles behind LLMs, which can’t think, don’t have consciousness, and don’t hold personal opinions. But I need to state my position on authors using LLMs to work with texts, given the reaction we saw to “OP-ED: When the Bar Is Low, Don’t Dig for Gold — WPT’s Non-Merky Branding Problem” by Sara O’Connor.

Here are a few important facts about this situation:

• Sara is not a PokerListings employee and did not receive any payments from us for this article.
• This article is an op-ed, meaning it reflects the author’s opinion, not the editorial stance. We gave Sara access to our audience because we consider the original topic important — a call for brands to treat their audiences ethically.
• Sara did not inform us about the use of AI when working on the text; we learned about it through X. After finding out, we added a note before the article.
• We do not have information about the extent of AI use. According to gptzero’s analysis, the article is a mix of the author’s writing and several AI-edited sections.
• We do not consider the use of AI a wrongdoing. It is a tool that helps work with text, not a way to form opinions. We understand the reaction from journalists, but we encourage a reasonable approach to LLMs — just as people previously approached spell-checking services, and before them, typewriters.
• Excessive AI use may become a problem, if not now, then in the near future. This topic deserves broad discussion and the development of new ethical norms. Shifting the full responsibility for using LLMs onto a single author seems like an overly harsh reaction that distracts from the original issue she raised.

P.S. After writing this block of text, I checked it with the same gptzero service and found out that I am AI. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. The line between authored and generated text is becoming blurred, and our detection tools have proved unable to provide accurate assessment. And still, I’d like to assure you that I wrote this text myself; it took me 24 minutes, and an AI would have done it faster — and the result would have been better.

The Pirates

There are projects whose entire business is built solely on exploiting other people’s content and other people’s promotional campaigns.

We’ve received reports that pirates steal passwords for our freerolls, after which the passwords appear on third-party websites. As a result, you end up playing with a large audience of people you don’t know, and your experience with tournaments gets worse.

We’re aware of this issue, but unfortunately it’s unavoidable when tournaments are protected by a password. We could make the user experience worse by complicating the password distribution, but pirates are regular people and will pass the same checks as everyone else.

Any password available to visitors is also available to pirates.

The only way to avoid this problem is to stop using passwords and switch to affiliate-based access.

You can already see such freerolls with us on Coinpoker and 888Poker IT. For example, Coinpoker tournaments get between 6 and 12 players, and the prizes are 100 USDT. 

Unfortunately, there’s another side to this. Players who registered through a different affiliate but still follow our content lose the opportunity to join these tournaments.

For now, we mostly use password-protected freerolls so that everyone interested can participate.

But we want to give our players more opportunities, so we’ll be creating tournaments without passwords that will be available only to our players.

We’ll try to expand this option with Coinpoker in January. Register through our link and follow the updates.

December

In December we’re preparing a Christmas promotion together with Americas Cardroom. We’ll offer a record number of tournaments and a special final at the end of the Christmas period. The tournaments will run in a different time zone, which may be inconvenient for our regular players. But we’ve added so many events to the schedule that those who want to play will be able to join them on weekends. And our regular tournaments aren’t going anywhere. There will be a lot of action for tournament players!

January

And in January we’re planning to give our Coinpoker players an excellent opportunity to grow their bankroll. Only players registered through our link will get access to the promotion. According to our calculations, this will be the most profitable promo for our players in the history of PokerListings. Stay tuned!