Only users who have already registered and completed age verification will be able to access the world's largest porn site. Pornhub is blocking itself in the United Kingdom on February 2, arguing that the country's age verification laws are ineffective, the company announced on Tuesday. As of February 2, only users who have already registered with Pornhub and completed age verification will be able to access the site. New users will not be able to register. The move comes after a new set of provisions aimed at keeping minors from viewing porn kicked in last July, requiring adults to submit to age-estimating face scans, ID document uploads, credit card checks, and more, in order to verify that they are not minors.

Confirming which users are kids is politically fraught and a technical nightmare. Here's what moves from OpenAI and the FTC tell us. How do tech companies check if their users are kids? This question has taken on new urgency recently thanks to growing concern about the dangers that can arise when children talk to AI chatbots. For years Big Tech asked for birthdays (that one could make up) to avoid violating child privacy laws, but they weren't required to moderate content accordingly. Two developments over the last week show how quickly things are changing in the US and how this issue is becoming a new battleground, even among parents and child-safety advocates.

Age Verification Is Reaching a Global Tipping Point. Is TikTok's Strategy a Good Compromise? TikTok's new age-detection tech seems like a better solution than automatically banning youth accounts. But experts say it still requires social platforms to surveil users more closely. Governments worldwide are moving to limit children's access to social media as lawmakers question whether platforms are capable of enforcing their own minimum age requirements.

Alabama passed a 10 percent porn tax last year, as Utah and Pennsylvania eye similar bills. Half the country has enacted age-verification laws to prevent minors from viewing porn. As age-verification laws continue to dismantle the adult industry--and determine the future of free speech on the internet --a Utah lawmaker proposed a bill this week that would enforce a tax on porn sites that operate within the state. Introduced by state senator Calvin Musselman, a Republican, the bill would impose a 7 percent tax on total receipts "from sales, distributions, memberships, subscriptions, performances, and content amounting to material harmful to minors that is produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based" in Utah. If passed, the bill would go into effect in May and would also require adult sites to pay a $500 annual fee to the State Tax Commission.

The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the US. Half of the country now requires age verification to watch porn or access "harmful" content. Digital rights advocates are pushing back against legislation they say will make the internet less safe. To prove you're an adult, you may have to upload your ID or submit to an age-verifying face scan. Members of Congress considered 19 online safety bills Tuesday that may soon have a major impact on the future of the internet as age-verification laws have spread to half of the US and around the world .

YouTube is one of the most popular online platforms in the U.S. among all age groups. But not all content on the video-sharing site is appropriate for all ages. While the platform, like most, has restrictions on certain content, such as violence and nudity, for users under 18, these safeguards have in the past been easy for young users to circumvent by entering an older birthdate on their account. But now, the company is rolling out an artificial intelligence-powered tool to estimate a user's age based on their activity on the platform "and then use that signal, regardless of the birthday in the account, to deliver our age-appropriate product experiences and protection," said James Beser, director of product management at YouTube Youth, in blog post last month. The technology, according to Beser, has been used in other markets "for some time" and will begin being tested in the U.S. on Wednesday before a wider rollout.

In July, Siyan, a UK-based Discord user, logged on one morning and found himself unable to access some of his text chats marked NSFW. The channel, a popup informed him, was now age-restricted. The United Kingdom had enacted its far reaching child safety laws, which includes an age requirement system to verify users are over 18. Discord's updates required users to verify their age, either by government ID or a face scan. Siyan (who requested to only be referred to by his screen name for privacy reasons) describes himself as "painfully over the age of needing to fake an ID." He didn't want to take a photo of his ID.

In the near future a governmental body will be asked to allow companies to use AI for age verification. If they allow it the resulting system will both be easily circumvented and disproportionately misclassify minorities and low socioeconomic status users. This is predictable by showing that other very similar systems (facial recognition and remote proctoring software) have similar issues despite years of efforts to mitigate their biases. These biases are due to technical limitations both of the AI models themselves and the physical hardware they are running on that will be difficult to overcome below the cost of government ID-based age verification. Thus in, the near future, deploying an AI system for age verification is folly.

This paper introduces a comprehensive model for age estimation, verification, and comparability, offering a comprehensive solution for a wide range of applications. It employs advanced learning techniques to understand age distribution and uses confidence scores to create probabilistic age ranges, enhancing its ability to handle ambiguous cases. The model has been tested on both proprietary and public datasets and compared against one of the top-performing models in the field. Additionally, it has recently been evaluated by NIST as part of the FATE challenge, achieving top places in many categories.

Three systems that verify peoples' age with AI technology to prevent minors from being exposed to harmful content have been endorsed by Germany's Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media. The commission is Germany's central supervisory body for the protection of minors on private nationwide television and the internet. These AI systems, which the body has given a positive rating, are trained by machine learning to assess a person's age based on biometric characteristics. "The fact that AI can now also be used for age verification and thus to protect children and young people from problematic content is an important, new step," said the commission's chairman, Marc Jan Eumann, in a press release last week (24 May). According to Eumann, the use of AI in this area is a "milestone in the technical protection of children and young people in media.