For some reason ChatGPT has suddenly started thinking i'm a teen. Every answer it starts out "Since you are a teen I will..." and prompts me to upload an ID to show my age. I'm 35.
OpenAI demanded I prove my age in November 2025. I’m an educated 50 year old and had been paying for the service for over a year.
When they insisted I prove my age I went through two layers of support but got nowhere. They insisted I go through their verification process.
I refused and cancelled my subscription.
This may be a losing battle but I’m not going to upload a photo to these services.
Does OpenAI have an incentive to get age prediction "wrong" so that more people "verify" their ages by uploading an ID or scanning their face, allowing "OpenAI" to collect more demographic data just in time to enable ads?
>behavioral and account-level signals, including how long an account has existed, typical times of day when someone is active, usage patterns over time, and a user’s stated age.
Surely they're using "history of the user-inputted chat" as a signal and just choosing not to highlight that? Because that would make it so much easier to predict age.
Anyone remember the game Leisure Suit Larry? To get the full 18+ experience, you had to answer five trivia questions that only adults should know. But it turns out smart teens who like trivia knew most of them too (and you could just ask mom and dad, they had no clue why you were asking which President appeared on Laugh In).
Its for both; the loosened guardrails around sex and the advertising roll-out are both explicitly for logged-in adults, and the age prediction is how they determine the logged-in user is an “adult”.
Do you expect the data collected for age verification will be completely separate from the advertising apparatus? I would expect the incentives would align for this to enhance their advertising options.
I'll almost certainly get used for both, but I believe "adult content" is the primary motivator. If it was just for ads they wouldn't even bother announcing it as a "feature", they'd just do it.
Also:
"Users can check if safeguards have been added to their account and start this process at any time by going to Settings > Account."
Hard no. It's so easy to get "flagged" by opaque systems for "Age verification" processes or account lockouts that require giving far too much PII to a company like this for my liking.
> Users who are incorrectly placed in the under-18 experience will always have a fast, simple way to confirm their age and restore their full access with a selfie through Persona, a secure identity-verification service.
Yea, my linkedin account which was 15 years old and was a paid pro user for several years got flagged for verification (no reason ever given, I rarely used it for anything other than interacting with recruiters) with this same company as their backend provider. They wouldn't accept a (super invasive feeling) full facial scan + a REAL ID, they also wanted a passport. So I opted out of the platform. There was no one to contact - it wasn't "fast" or "easy" at all. This kind of behavior feels like a data grab for more nefarious actors and data brokers further downstream of these kinds of services.
The unfortunate reality is this isn't just corporations acting against user's interests, governments around the world are pushing for these surveillance systems as well. It's all about centralizing power and control.
Yeah, this is all far far too invasive. The goal is obviously to gather as much data on you as possible under whatever pretense users are most likely to accept. "Think of the children", as always. This will then be used to sell advertising to you, or outright sell it to data brokers.
Protecting the kids and fighting terror. Anything that can't be argued against is always used as a justification of people in power who don't want to incite a riot.
Politicians, CEOs, Lawyers it's standard practice because it's so effective.
Hey Al, they might be implying that non-minors would be impervious to the viral challenges based on some sort of well-developed critical thinking facilities. I am not so optimistic.
A lot of people are using AI as a trusted friend, because they don't really have anyone else. A good friend would, I hope, talk someone out of doing something dangerous just to get a silly viral video. With AI being trained on the internet, that's going to have a very different take on things, as the internet only cares about the spectacle, not the person performing it.
Agreed. We need to take away Internet access from psychologically susceptible people. Those with any mental illness should probably access the Internet only under supervision. They can request a URL and an online proctor can be automatically contacted who will view their screen and make sure that they are not viewing dangerous things.
It is truly not just children who need protection.
Agreed, we must protect those diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia[1] from the internet by sending them to off line vacation homes in Siberia. Can't risk them becoming disillusioned with our great motherland!
> We need to take away Internet access from psychologically susceptible people. Those with any mental illness should probably access the Internet only under supervision.
Great way to ensure nobody seeks mental health treatment.
I think they really should charge with micropayments, and they could even roll out their own currency for that if need be. Ads suck.
Actually, all the AI companies together should choose a micropayment system to focus on. I know in fashion, I've seen what would seem like competing brands center around a common "pillar of influence."
Also, if (long-tail?) AI companies work together, they could install appliances and terminals around cities. The most immediate use case - transport timetables. It seems like a no-brainer the more I think about it. Especially good for tourists who don't speak the local language. Governments may end up wanting to do that anyway and could subsidize the cost. It really depends on how fixated people are to owning their own screen, versus using someone else's. Those city screens could end up billboards anyway - especially for local businesses. They could print for a fee too and third parties could pay to get their app listed. Also, it's worth considering the increase in wealth inequality and rising hardware costs for people to own and stream into their own device. So this could be like the Internet Cafe 2.0.
Incidentally, there's a recent thread about someone streaming HN to a cheap display: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46699782 - why not have such displays around town? I guess one major problem is vandalism.
I prefer dumb phones, and then prefer to not have to carry one 24/7.
Device lock-in is a whole other discussion. Why can't phones be switched off anyhow in terms of telco signal? Yet their Wifi and Bluetooth can be. Weird. What are they doing in stealth?
You don’t think your preference for not using a smart phone makes a viable market do you - seeing global penetration of smartphones is 90% and even higher among those who can afford to travel?
I think compulsory 2FA and the trend towards must-have downloadable phone apps is a problem, but that may not be fully evident... yet. In my experience, being tied to a phone and phone number is a problem. Also, when you carry your phone, your funds are at risk too from tech-jacking (as opposed to car-jacking) .. especially with crypto, right?
It's a personal choice - you are also tied to a battery charger. Wait, solar panels are getting better.
Why is it so difficult to run a mobile app on a PC? Why can't there be a device that I connect to my laptop to turn it into a phone (voice + texts) whenever the need arises? Weird. What's with the identification required at SIM point-of-sale? Is someone trying to track me or something?
Pay phones exist where I am, but they don't require money anymore. They're free and no ID required. They also have phone numbers attached to them. Maybe if it had a free computer next to it, lol. Then it can take micro-donations?!
Oh. I do pay since basically the day they offered it. It's not a matter that they should care.
No ads is a point of product differentiation. One among many. But in some sense ads are a natural resource curse that pervade the whole company. Again, I point to Apple vs Google/Meta.
People who haven't seen an ad or paid a subscription in 20 years are still trying to figure out why no one listens to their opinion on how to make the internet better.
You give too much credit to Apple in the AI age. Especially since they've already partnered with Google to power Siri with Gemini now.
Apple is a has-been. Anthropic is best positioned to take up the privacy mantle, and may even be forced to, given that most of their revenue is enterprise and B2B.
I agree with you and it's really sad that Tim couldn't take Apple in the direction of user safety over profit.
I hope there's some layer between Apple and Gemini but only those at the helm can be trusted to make that happen and I don't trust them to choose users over the dollar.
> I hope there's some layer between Apple and Gemini
In the press release Apple said they will be running this on their own hardware (both on-device and private cloud). They're not going to be directly routing requests to Gemini hosted by Google.
This obviously doesn't preclude some kind of data sharing arrangement, but there is at least some indirection between the two.
Exactly. The more data they can collect, the better.
Is it not in OpenAI's best interested for them to accidentally flag adults as teens so they have to "verify" their age by handing over their biometric data (Persona face scan) or their government ID? Certainly that level of granularity will enhance the product they offer for their advertisers.
> We’re learning from the initial rollout and continuing to improve the accuracy of age prediction over time
> While this is an important milestone, our work to support teen safety is ongoing.
agreed, I guess we'll be seeing some pushbacks similar to Apple's CSAM but overall it's about getting a better demographics on their consumers for better advertising especially when you have a one-click actions combined with it. We'll be seeing handful of middleware plugins (like Honey) popping up, which I think the intended usecase for something like chat based apps
Random reply: 20 days ago you asked for my ChatGPT custom instructions to be more skeptical. It is :
Use an encouraging tone. Adopt a skeptical, questioning approach. Call me on things which don't seem right. List possible assumptions I'm making if any.
Whenever anything involving advertisers and AI comes up I wonder, are we supposed to believe both that they are on the cusp of creating God and that advertising revenue is a meaningful second goal?
Considering that OpenAI is having trouble getting its models to avoid recommending suicide (something it probably does not want for ANY user), I rather doubt this age prediction is going to be that helpful for curbing the tool's behavior.
Does regulators really care about a predicted age? I feel like they require hard proof of being above age to show explicit content. The only ones that care about predicted age is advertisers.
In the UK, age verification just has to be "robust" (not further specified). Face scanning, for example, is explicitly designated as an allowed heuristic.
It's not much for the regulators as much as its for the advertisers.
At this point, just use gemini (yes its google and has its issues if you need SOTA) or I have recently been trying out more and more chat.z.ai for simple text issues (like hey can you fix this docker issue etc.) and I feel like chat.z.ai is pretty good plus open source models (honestly chat.z.ai feels pretty SOTA to me)
Kagi's Assistant is the most useful tool I've found as far as searching goes, and occasionally simple codegen. Let's you use a wide variety of models and isn't tracking me.
If we are talking about complete privacy. I am trying out https://confer.to (created by signal team) too and I am unable to run it on my mac (passkey support)(I tried it both in zen & orion) but I tried it on an android chrome (tablet) and I am kinda more optimistic about it too
I have heard good things about Kagi in fact, that's the reason why I tried orion and still have it in the first place but I haven't bought Kagi, I just used the free searches orion gives & I don't know if it has Kagi's assistant.
I think proton's Lumo is another good bet.
If you want something to not track you, I once asked cerebras team on their discord if they track the queries and responses from their website try now feature and they said that they don't. I don't really see a reason why they might lie about it given that its only meant for very basic purposes & they don't train models or anything.
You also get one of the fastest inferences for models including GLM 4.7 (which z.ai uses)
You might not get search results though but for search related queries duck.ai's pretty good and you can always mix and match.
But Cerebras recently got a 10 billion $ investment from OpenAI and I Have been critical of them from now on so do be wary now.
Kagi Assistant does seem to be good if someone already uses Kagi or has a subscription of it from what I feel like.
Any proof that you are above a certain age will also expose you identity.
That is the only reason regulators care about children safety online, because they care about ID.
LLMs are very good at profiling users in hacker news and finding alt accounts, for example. profiling is the best use case for llms.
So there you go, maybe it wont give exactly what regulators say they want, but it will give exactly what they truly want.
It's nonsense and doesn't work. They have "age predicted" my account a couple of months back saying I'm under 18, while I'm a man in my 40s who uses ChatGPT for mostly work related stuff, and nothing that would indicate that it's someone under 18. So now they are asking for a government ID to prove it. Yeah, no thanks.
I've been very aggressive toward OpenAI on here about parental controls and youth protection, and I have to say the recent work is definitely more than I expected out of them.
Interesting. Do you believe OpenAI has earned user trust and will be good stewards of the enhanced data (biometric, demographic, etc) they are collecting?
To me, this feels nefarious with the recent push into advertising. Not only are people dating these chat bots, but they are more trusting of these AI systems than people in their own life. Now, OpenAI is using this "relationship" to influence user's buying behavior.
This is a thoughtful response and deserves discussion. Yes, certainly, OpenAI might get your age wrong. Yes, certainly, they’re signaling to advertisers.
But consider OPs point — ChatGPT has become a safety-critical system. It is a tool capable of pushing a human towards terrible actions, and there are documented cases of it doing this.
In that context, what is the responsibility of OpenAI to keep their product away from the most vulnerable, and the most easily influenced? More than zero, I believe.
It's really really not. "Safety-critical system" has a meaning, and a chat bot doesn't qualify. Treating the whole world as if it needs to be wrapped in bubble-wrap is extremely unhealthy and it generally just used as an excuse for creeping authoritarianism.
I'm an engineer working on safety-critical systems and have to live with that responsibility every day.
When I read the chat logs of the first teenager who committed suicide with the help and encouragement of ChatGPT I was immediately thinking about ways that could be avoided that make sense in the product. I want companies like OpenAI to have the same reaction and try things. I'm just glad they are.
I'm also fully aware this is unpopular on HN and will get downvoted by people who disagree. Too many software devs without direct experience in safety-critical work (what would you do if you truly are responsible?), too few parents, too many who are just selfishly worried their AI might get "censored".
There are really good arguments against this stuff (e.g. the surveillance effects of identity checks, the efficacy of age verification, etc.) and plenty of nuance to implementations, but the whole censorship angle is lame.
I am against companies doing age verification like this due to the surveillance effects, but I agree with you that the censorship angle is not a good one.
I suppose mainly because I don't think a non-minor committing suicide with ChatGPT's help and encouragement matters less than a minor doing so. I honestly thing the problem is the user interface for GPT being a chat. I think it has a psychological effect that you can talk to ChatGPT the same way you can talk to Emily from school. I don't think this is a solvable problem if OpenAI wants this to be their main product (and obviously they do).
A society which took psychological safety seriously would never have created ChatGPT in the first place. But of course seriously advocating for safety would cost one their toys, and for one unwilling to pay that cost, empowering the surveillance apparatus seems very reasonable and easily confused for safe. When one’s children or friends’ children can no longer enter an airport because some vibe-coded slop leaked their biometrics, we’ll see if that holds true.
Maybe we don’t all need saving from ourselves. Maybe we need to grow up and have some personal responsibility. As someone who is happy to do that, seeing personal freedom endlessly slashed in the name of safety is tiresome.
My feelings have absolutely nothing to do with censorship. That’s just an easy straw man for you to try and dismiss my point of view, because you’re scared of not feeling safe.
Cool, I'd like you to make a commercial system you sell access to and ensure that it is unsafe. I'll represent the injured and we'll own all your corporate assets, and like will pierce the corporate veil due to your wonton behavior.
What are you on about? Laws are a codification of social norms. I’m not suggesting anything outside of existing social norms. Quite the opposite, I’m suggesting we stop changing them.
Conversely I'm arguing your "everyone should just" argument is meaningless for addressing social change and behavior, hence your discussion is adding nothing. Of course neither of us see our communication as meaningless so it's up to the other readers to decide the merits of our text.
I was addressing your own (supposedly) safety-critical work, how you’ve used that to justify other work in the name of safety more broadly, and how you’ve placed yourself on a pedestal with your experience, to convince yourself that comments by others on the necessity of such safety are less qualified.
Sorry, but for every chat log with one teenager who commited suicide due to AI, I'm sure you can find many more of people/teens with suicide thoughts or intent that are explicitly NOT doing it because of advice from AI systems.
I'm pretty sure AI has saved more lives than it has taken, and there's pretty strong arguments to say that someone whose thinking of committing suicide will likely be thinking about it with or without AI systems.
Yes, sometimes you really do "have to take one for the team" in regards to tragedy. Indeed, Charlie Kirk was literally talking about this the EXACT moment he took one for the team. It is a very good thing that this website is primarily not parents, as they cannot reason with a clear unbiased opinion. This is why we have dispassionate lawyers to try to find justice, and why we should have non parents primarily making policy involving systems like this.
Also, parents today are already going WAY to far with non consensual actions taken towards children. If you circumcised your male child, you have already done something very evil that might make them consider suicide later. Such actions are so normalized in the USA that not doing it will make you be seen as weird.
The relatively arbitrary cutoff at 18 is also an indication that this is a blunt tool, intended to alleviate some low-lying fruit of potential misuse but which will clearly miss the larger mark since there will be plenty of false positives (not to mention false negatives).
Some kids are mature enough from day one to never need tech overlords to babysit them, while others will need to be hand-held through adulthood. (I've been online since I was 12, during the wild and wooly Usenet and BBS days, and was always smart enough not to give personal info to strangers; I also saw plenty of pornographic images [paper] from an even younger age and turned out just fine, thank you.)
Maybe instead of making guesses about people's ages, when ChatGPT detects potentially abusive behavior, it should walk the user through a series of questions to ensure the user knows and understands the risks.
> typical times of day when someone is active, usage patterns over time,
> Users [...] will always have a [...] simple way to confirm their age and restore their full access with a selfie through Persona, a secure identity-verification service.
Nice, so now your most secret inner talk with the LLM can be directly associated with face and ID. Get ready for the fun moment when Trump decide that he needs to see what are your discussions with the AI when you pass the border or piss him off...
When we look at how fast and coordinated the rollout of age verification has been around the globe, it's hard not to wonder if there was some impetus behind it.
Agreed - Interesting that these systems inevitably involve proving you're a citizen in some way, which seems unnecessary if your goal is to try to figure out someone's age.
I imagine they're building this system with the goal of extracting user demographics (age, sex, income) from chat conversations to improve advertising monetization.
This seems to be a side project of their goal and a good way to calibrate the future ad system predictions.
For context though, people have been screaming lately at OpenAI and other AI companies about not doing enough to protect the children. Almost like there is no winning, and one should just make everything 18+ to actually make people happy.
What a coincidence: "protect the children" narrative got amplified right about when implementing profiling became needed for openai profits. Pure magic
I get why you're questioning motives, I'm sure it's convenient for them at this time.
But age verification is all over the place. Entire countries (see Australia) have either passed laws, or have laws moving through legislative bodies.
Many platforms have voluntarily complied. I expect by 2030, there won't be a place on Earth where not just age verification, but identity is required to access online platforms. If it wasn't for all the massive attempts to subvert our democracies by state actors, and even political movements within democratic societies, it wouldn't be so pushed.
But with AI generated videos, chats, audio, images, I don't think anyone will be able to post anything on major platforms without their ID being verified. Not a chat, not an upload, nothing.
I think consumption will be age vetted, not ID vetted.
But any form of publishing, linked to ID. Posting on X. Anything.
I've fought for freedom on the Internet, grew up when IRC was a thing, knew more freedom on the net than most using it today. But when 95% of what is posted on the net, is placed there with the aim to harm? Harm our societies, our peoples?
Well, something's got to give.
Then conjoin that with the great mental harm that smart phones and social media do to youth, and.. well, anonymity on the net is over. Like I said at the start, likely by 2030.
(Note: having your ID known doesn't mean it's public. You can be registered, with ID, on X, on youtube, so the platform knows who you are. You can still be MrDude as an alias...)
Every "protect the children" measure that involves increased surveillance is balanced by an equal and opposing "now the criminal pedophiles in positions of power have more information on targets".
And also to reduce account sharing. How will a family share an account when they simultaneously make the adult account more “adult”, and make the kids account more annoying for adults.
safe to say everything in existence is created to extract user demographics.
it was never about you finding information, this trillion market exists to find you.
it was never about you summarizing information getting around advertisement, it is about profiling you.
this trillion market is not about empowering users to style their pages more quickly, heh
It’s absolutely crucial for effective ad monetization to know the users age - significant avenues are closed down due to various legislation like COPPA and similar around the world. It severely limits which users can even be subject to ads, the kind of ads, and whether data can be collected for profiling and targeting for ads.
It feels like OpenAI is moving into the extraction phase far too soon. They are making their product less appealing to end users with ads and aggressive user-data gathering (which is what this really is). Usually you have to be very secure in your position as a market segment owner before you start with the anti-consumer moves, but they are rapidly losing market share, and they have essentially no moat. Is the goal just to speed-run an IPO before they lose their position?
> ChatGPT automatically applies additional protections designed to reduce exposure to sensitive content, such as:
* Graphic violence or gory content
* Viral challenges that could encourage risky or
harmful behavior in minors
* Sexual, romantic, or violent role play
* Depictions of self-harm
* Content that promotes extreme beauty standards,
unhealthy dieting, or body shaming
That wording implies that's not comprehensive, but hate and disinformation are omitted.
Wait, I don't understand this. Does it mean that they can erroneously predict I'm a minor, covertly restrict my account without me knowing? I guess it's time to cancel my subscription.
Yes, it listed a few of my past questions as reference points. I had asked some questions about Nintendo 64/Dreamcast and Gamecube games. It also used information I had asked it about programming languages and some work-related questions to guess my age.
I don't know how OpenAI plans to do this going forward, just quickly read the article and figured that might be a good question to ask ChatGPT.
Edit: I just followed that up with, "Based on everything I've asked, what gender am I?" It refused to answer, stating it wouldn't assume my gender and treats me as gender neutral.
So I guess it's ok for an AI agent to assume your age, but not your gender... ?
I don't really feel like diving into the ethics of OpenAI at the moment lol.
If they are shielding you giving back answers, doesn’t mean there is a lot of profiling going on behind the screens of all big tech. How close are they to behavioral monitoring?
OpenAI are liars. I have all the privacy settings on, and it still assumes things about me that it would only do if it knew all my previous conversations.
Let's be honest - to protect the children, big tech will put everyone under the suspicion of being one. And the issue is not how they use the technologies they have, because they have a moral responsibility to do it safely, but that we don't have technologies of hours.
What I wonder lately is how an adult person can be empowered by tech to bare the consequences of their action and the answer usually is that we cannot. We don''t have the means of production in the literal marxist definition of the phrase and we are being shaped by outside forces that define what we can do with ourselves. And it does not matter if those forces are benevolent or not, it matters that it is not us.
The winter is coming and we are short on thermal underware.
The chinese open models being reason for hope is just a very sad joke.
well I hope it's better than Spotify's age prediction which came to the conclusion that I'm 87 years old.
Seriously though this is the most easily game-able thing imaginable, pretty sure teens are clever enough to figure out how to pretend to be an adult. If you've come to the conclusion that your product is unsuited for kids implement actual age verification instead of these shoddy stochastic surveillance systems. There's a reason "his voice sounded deep" isn't going to work for the cashier who sold kids booze
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