YouTube Is Using AI to Guess Your Age

Age verification on the internet used to be a bit of a joke. The whole thing worked on the honor system, and few of us kept our honor. YouTube might be for users 13 and up, but that’s not going to stop an 11-year-old from watching.

But that internet is rapidly being left in the past. Depending on where you live, some sites and services are verifying the ages of their users, most through mandatory ID checks. Now, YouTube is joining the party, by employing AI to guess how old you are.

How YouTube’s AI age verification works

In a July blog post, YouTube announced it would start rolling out “machine learning” (read: AI) to a small pool of users over the coming weeks, specifically to estimate how old they are. Now we know that this age verification is rolling out en masse on Aug. 13. YouTube wants to identify whether a user is a teen or an adult. (Remember: YouTube intends for its service to be used only by users 13 and up, and assumes any users younger than that are on YouTube Kids.)

The AI does not necessarily pay attention to the age listed in the account, as YouTube knows some users might be misrepresenting how old they are. Rather, these new programs look at identifying habits that are associated with age groups. That includes things like the types of videos a user might be searching for, the style of video they’ve been watching, or how old the account is.

If YouTube’s AI determines that the user is an adult, that user can continue to use YouTube as they normally would. However, should the AI infer that the user is a teen, the site will implement “age-appropriate” protections. If your account is flagged as a teen account by the AI, you can expect the following:

• No more personalized advertising: YouTube will still show you ads, but they won’t be targeted to you based on your ad profile, so you’ll be less likely to click on ads.

• Digital wellbeing tools: These include reminders to take a break from YouTube, a breakdown of how much time you’ve spent watching videos, combining all your YouTube notifications into one single alert, and disabling notification sounds and vibrations.

• Recommendation safeguards: With a teen account, you might find that some of your recommendations are limited, such as limiting the amount of times you can watch a certain type of video.

• Private by default: If you upload videos to YouTube, the platform will set the upload to private by default. YouTube will also show you privacy “reminders” when uploading videos or commenting publicly.

• Gift restrictions: YouTube will restrict your ability to earn from gifts on vertical live streams (live streaming from your smartphone).

What if YouTube’s AI gets your age wrong?

So, you’re 18 or older, but for some reason, YouTube thinks you’re a minor. In this case, the burden of proof concerning your age is not on YouTube, but on you.

What do you think so far?