In the past decade, esports has become one of the fastest growing trends in the traditional sports betting world. Titles like Dota 2, League of Legends and Counter Strike Global Offensive have been added to many famous sportsbooks, and the popularity of esports betting is growing at a phenomenal rate.

But with the news that artificial intelligence software has just managed to beat a team of some of the best esports players in the business, it raises a few interesting questions about how competitive gaming will be viewed at sports betting sites.

Things came to a head last week when the OpenAI Five artificial intelligence software comfortably beat five players from OG at Dota 2. OG are one of the best esports teams in the business, but despite having earned plenty of acclaim for their skill on the Dota 2 battle arena game, they simply couldn’t match the powers of artificial intelligence.

This is because the deep learning system of OpenAI Five was able to exploits weaknesses in the OG team and could adopt aggressive and unconventional tactics to win the best-of-three match. In addition to this, it was revealed that the artificial intelligence software could also easily learn to play alongside human players and mimic their playing styles.

All of which poses the question of if artificial intelligence is better at playing esports like Dota 2 than real humans, why shouldn’t fans be able to bet on the gaming software, rather than the relatively weak real-life esports teams? Most betting fans will always want to wager on the teams who are able to deliver the match winning result, and so the rise of artificial intelligence could mean that things get a little more confusing in the coming years.

Whilst artificial intelligence is unlikely to make its presence felt in traditional sports like football and basketball for some fairly obvious reasons, the dependency on esports upon technology has raised many ethical issues that should be factored in. We have seen many licensed and reliable esports betting sites unveiled recently that take great pride in showing off more odds for titles like Dota 2 than their rivals. A big part of the reason as to why people like using these sites is that they allow them to bet on the best esports teams in the biggest esports competitions from all over the world.

But with artificial intelligence appearing to be able to quickly beat human players, it could spell trouble for the future of many esports teams. The world of competitive gaming has already courted plenty of controversy over some troubling match fixing scandals in the past, and the arrival of artificial intelligence tech also raises new issues about how regulators are going to ensure fair-play in these gaming tournaments.

Thankfully, it looks like artificial intelligence isn’t quite ready to take over esports completely just yet. Whilst the OpenAI Five software managed to beat OG fairly comfortably, it seems as though the software can only play to a fairly restricted set of rules so far. In addition to this, it was found that human players are still much better to strategise over their gameplay in the long-term, whilst the OpenAI Five software was limited to short-term gaming strategies.

However, now that artificial intelligence has shown that it can beat human opponents on esports like Dota 2, it means that there could be a future where gaming fans will simply want to bet on competing software rather than real-life players. It’s up for debate whether software will be able to provide the sheer drama afforded by human competitors, and it’s also true that the spectator experience for an AI esports game could be more than a little sterile. But as it’s the gameplay that esports fans like to watch, it’s clear that artificial intelligence could play a much greater role in the future.