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Comment by throwaway914 | Hacker News Reader

So I'm wondering why we don't use AI to determine the likely age of a user from the photos they upload. Obviously there will be false-positives but then you can just ask them to upload a picture of their state ID/drivers license.

(I don't participate in social media, beyond HN...)

To me this would seem like a great idea. A couple hundred thousand folks who look 13 but are legally 26 who jump through some extra hoops, but several million children who cannot create a Facebook account.

The risk to reward seems awesome.

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Any site that isn't my bank (or related), asking for my ID is just going to lose me as a user or if I have to use it, just encourage me to create several accounts to frequently rotate between.

As a minor I'd have had even more time to bother with something tedious like that.

See the problem here is I don't view social media as a loss, at least on the level of Facebook.

throwaway914, would you be willing to send over your drivers license for verification to participate on HN?

Nope. That's why I'm not on Facebook, which presently asks for ID when it deems necessary.

Or we could treat people like human beings and get rid of this idea that only children are harmed by social media and the constant bombardment of advertisers and “influencers”.

Most of the advertisers and influencers I know personally are children.

i don’t think we need AI to solve any of these issues, or that we should be using AI as a kneejerk solution to almost anything currently

Presently they don't have the staff or the willingness to vet that all users are above the age of 13.

You can use makeup and let the AI think whatever age you are aiming for. It's not perfectly predictable but I haven't found any age AI that doesn't rank me from underage to old depending on what I aim for.

My guess is videos would work much better. But photos definitely don't yet.

My understanding is currently they do not vet user age. How could they? There are a few billion users. Even among different ethnicities people look younger or older depending on the society they group in. However, I was looking at this from a "confidence score" perspective. If it's an open secret that employees do nothing, throw AI at it to flat likely-to-be-underage users. Then throw what portion of employees you can at that effort, rather than vetting ~2 billion users.

The very obvious loophole is that a teen could upload a picture of someone else to get an account made.

...and everyone uploading pictures of their kids would have to keep their drivers license handy.

I think only kid's driver licenses should be accepted... You should not be able to post a picture of kid on online.

Yes. True.

I think if you use someone's photo for Facebook, they're likely to already be on the site.

You could also have the AI look at the photos that are uploaded over time and if they look very different from the person who supposedly created the account...and comments from others are not questioning why these are a different person.

Right now they don't have people vetting. Throw AI at it for non-perfect but better results. As long as it's not a gov site I'm okay with this. Got off Facebook in 2005 when the first of my relatives became racists.

There's a lot of money to be made from those users.

Yeah, you can tell you don't use social media by this comment's suggestion, no need to tell us separately.

Yeah, I also thought there is someone who doesn't know what social media is all about :)

Why not suggest folks get some token from the state and use that for identifying them exactly. And also, using clear names would help as one Always can Google up the name and make sure the other end doesn't pretend

Social media was ruined a long time ago. Even here it's a disparate, incomplete conversation. I commented knowing the response I'd get from HN about false positives with AI determining user age.

Time to sue Facebook for the market value of every underage user, and the continuing harm of having a public presence from that age forward. Every job lost, every lost opportunity.

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