YouTube warned us this was coming back in February. Now it's actually rolling out a new AI feature to determine the age of viewers and then feed them age-appropriate content.
According to an official YouTube blog post, this machine-learning approach to content filtering and user account classification has already been running in some unidentified markets for an unspecified period. But over the next few weeks, YouTube will "begin to roll out machine learning to a small set of users in the US to estimate their age, so that teens are treated as teens and adults as adults."
YouTube says it will closely monitor the technology, "before we roll it out more widely." The video streamer explains that the system allows it to "infer a user’s age and then use that signal, regardless of the birthday in the account, to deliver our age-appropriate product experiences and protections."
If YouTube, or rather YouTube's bot, decides a teenager is watching, a number of measures can come into play, including disabling personalised advertising, turning on digital wellbeing tools and adding safeguards to recommendations. This could also include limiting repetitive views of some kinds of content. Exactly what these tools and measures amount to, such as "digital wellbeing", isn't entirely clear.
As for how the AI system makes that judgement, YouTube says it interprets, "a variety of signals that help us to determine whether a user is over or under 18. These signals include the types of videos a user is searching for, the categories of videos they have watched, or the longevity of the account."
But what if YouTube gets it wrong? "If the system incorrectly estimates a user to be under 18, they will have the option to verify that they are 18 or over, such as using a credit card or a government ID. We will only allow users who have been inferred or verified as over 18 to view age-restricted content that may be inappropriate for younger users," YouTube says.
It will be interesting to see how accurate the AI age verification system proves to be. Certainly, AI is posing YouTube, or at least its viewers, at least as many problems as it is solving.
YouTube's earlier February blog post, which first mentioned the use of machine learning to filter user accounts, leaned more broadly into the benefits of AI, highlighting tools for creators, including AI-powered auto-dubbing and AI-generated video backgrounds and soundtracks.
On the other hand, a huge quantity of AI-generated slop is now uploaded to YouTube daily, and the company is currently either unwilling or unable to filter it all out. Overall, it remains to be seen if AI will more broadly prove a saviour or a curse for the platform. Oh, and us, the people who actually use it.
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