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

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