This question has recently taken on new urgency due to growing concern about the dangers that may arise when children talk to AI chatbots. For years Big Tech asked for birthdays (whoever they created) to avoid violating child privacy laws, but they were not required to moderate content accordingly. Two developments in the past week show how quickly things are changing in America and how this issue is becoming a new battleground even among parents and child-protection advocates.
In one corner is the Republican Party, which has supported laws passed in several states that require sites with adult content to verify the age of users. Critics say it provides cover to prevent anything deemed “harmful to minors”, which could also include sex education. Other states, like California, are coming after AI companies with laws to protect children who talk to chatbots (requiring them to verify who the child is). Meanwhile, President Trump is attempting to keep AI regulation a national issue rather than allowing states to make their own rules. Support continues for various bills in Congress.
So what can happen? The debate is increasingly moving away from whether age verification is necessary and toward who will be responsible for it. This responsibility is a difficult problem that no company wants to have.
one in blog post Last Tuesday, OpenAI revealed that it plans to launch automatic age prediction. In short, the company will implement a model that uses factors like time of day to predict whether the person chatting is under 18 or not. For those identifying as teens or children, ChatGPT will apply filters to “reduce the exposure” of content such as graphic violence or sexual role-play. youtube launched Something similar last year also.
If you support age verification but are concerned about privacy, this might seem like a win. but there is a problem. Of course, this system is not perfect, so it may misclassify a child as an adult or vice versa. People who have been mistakenly labeled as under 18 can verify their identity by submitting a selfie or government ID to a company called Persona.
There are problems with selfie verification: They fail more often for people of color and people with certain disabilities. Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, says the fact that Persona would need to hold millions of government IDs and vast amounts of biometric data is another weak point. “When these are breached, we have exposed a large population at once,” he says.
Hinduja instead advocates for device-level verification, where parents specify the child’s age when setting up the child’s phone for the first time. This information is then kept on the device and shared securely with apps and websites.
This is more or less what Apple CEO Tim Cook has to say. recently lobbied To call American lawmakers. Cook was fighting lawmakers who wanted to require the App Store to verify age, which would put too much liability on Apple.
