Body language models
AI is now calling bluffs in the world of poker. But the use of such AI need not be limited to poker.
How much easier would poker be if you always knew whether your opponent was bluffing? Wired reports on the 2026 World Series of Poker Main Event, where the sports network ESPN used a new AI tool to analyze the body language of poker players.
The tool is designed to identify so-called “tells” using footage from the tournament. These tells are small movements and micro-gestures, such as eye movements, twitches of the hands or legs, body posture, or the way a player holds their cards. Based on these, the system then calculates the probability that a player is, for example, currently bluffing. The AI is essentially doing the same thing top human poker players do when they study their opponents.
The idea seems obvious. AI is everywhere anyway, sports fans love statistics, and for years, more and more streams of additional information have been integrated into sports broadcasts, regardless of the sport. However, the reactions from poker pros have been mixed so far. Among other things, they doubt that the AI was even trained with enough data to be reliable, since it could only work with what was visible in the video stream and for some players that apparently wasn’t that much.
Shaun Deeb, one of the best-known poker pros and a participant in the tournament himself, is fundamentally skeptical about what the AI can detect:
Physical tells are so much more expansive than I think the public realizes [...] There are leg tells, checking tells, verbal tells, breathing tells, pulse tells. There’s an insane amount of tells available, and most of those can’t be picked up by a camera.
But Deeb may be underestimating just how much can be gleaned from a camera feed. We know from research that even with conventional online webcams, a person’s pulse can be measured based on the slightest changes in the color of their facial skin. The other tells sound relatively feasible by comparison, especially in Full HD.
Wired is primarily interested in the potential implications for poker. After all, the sport of poker is a highly lucrative business, with winnings in the millions and a very competitive field of players. It seems plausible that some poker pros will sooner or later come up with the idea of gaining an advantage by using such AI, leading to an arms race and countermeasures.
However, it’s not the impact on poker that worries me. The use of such AI need not be limited to poker. The desire for a reliable lie detector is old, and various technologies developed for this purpose have so far proven to be unreliable.
We’re not there yet. But given the breakneck speed of AI development, that offers me only limited reassurance. After all, it feels like just yesterday that AI image generation couldn’t even draw hands and fingers properly.
The realistic possibility that AI systems specialized in this area could improve similarly fast and enable reliable lie detection at scale does give me cause for concern. Even in free societies, this is likely to prove disruptive to our social fabric, and in more authoritarian societies, the consequences could be downright catastrophic.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.