Exactly, all under the guise of "protect the children" - a tried and true surveillance and control trope.

Tbf, they already had all the data they could use as they liked as per their EULA, I don't think they need a cover story.

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.

Lots of upsides for them.

I think they're quite explicitly saying they already can determine your demographics from your chats. Which is almost certainly true for most users.

Chatgpt has ads now?

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

That's how I learned the meaning of "prophylactic" at age 10, in front of a neighborhood friend's 286.

That's really funny and clever that this was a thing, thanks for sharing. I never had the fortune of trying to guess my way through these.

Some of those questions are highly regional. Like the W-4 being a tax form... Not where I'm from it's not!

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?

"How do you do, fellow kids? Err...skibidi toilet?" That should work, it's at least three years old now I think?

Forever young, my dude. Forever young.

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?

I hope Anthropic or someone pulls an Apple and has the taste to say no to ads. Maybe it will just be Apple. (Even their resistance is slowly fading..)

We don't need to jam ads into every orifice.

I hope there's more value to be had not doing ads than there is to include them. I'd cancel my codex/chatgpt/claude if someone planted the flag.

OpenAI seems to think it has infinite trust to burn.

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.

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.

It cracks me up that Persona is the vendor OpenAI will use to do manual verifications (as someone who works on integrations with Persona).

I'm glad ChatGPT will get a taste of VC startup tech quality ;)

Yep. Whenever platforms opt for more data I opt out. And like clockwork they let loose all that PII to hackers within months.

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.

New boss, same as the old boss.

Chat history would be a good signal to predict age until you give kids a reason to try to confound it.

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”.

Agreed, see https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-allow-mature-content...

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.

Exactly. Advertising will drive away users unless they are slowly trained into it, which will take time, time that Open AI doesn't have.

Meanwhile, the adult market is huge and sureshot revenue from a user base that is more likely to not mind the ads.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

That's because it was never really about protecting the children.

No more typing "how is babby formed" I guess.

Maybe at some point they will graduate to being able to predict who I am from "Friends"

That’s what they’re doing

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.

Are you suggesting regulations designed to protect children actually require more data collection and enable the surveillance economy?

Yes, but it's to protect the children! ;) Just scan your face in the app and your restrictions will be lifted.

>It was dead-on with its answer. It guessed 30-35. I'm 32.

Horoscopes must feel like literal magic to you.

But did it tell on what basis it made that assumption?

Stop using ChatGPT or pay $20/month (for now). Alternatively use the APIs instead

sounds like a good reason to stop using it no?