Australia’s under-16 social media ban to use hand-waving to verify ages with AI
On orders from the Rupert Murdoch newspapers, the Australian government has passed legislation banning under-16s from social media, on extremely dubious claims of protecting mental health. This is …
"Say you do a peace sign then a fist to the camera. It follows your hand movements. And medical research has shown based on your hand movement, it can identify your age.
This appears to be a gross distortion of a paper from AI company Haut.AI, who market an “AI skincare solution” to the beauty industry. The paper claimed to predict ages from hands and faces of Indian women. [Haut.AI; Wiley]"
Never change, Australia.
Why don't they just hire a wizard to cast an anti-tiktok spell over all of Australia instead? It would be just as workable and I know a guy who swears he can do it for cheaper than whatever server costs they're gonna try and push.
anyone know of an applicable rpg spell here. I want to know how much this would cost
As far as DnD 5e goes, I don't think anything less than Wish would do it and even that is up to DM discretion.
The only other systems I'm comparably closely familiar with are Ryūtama where all it takes is a level 7 Magic type character with 10 MP and summer's seasonal magic (and again, a pliable GM), an hour for the ritual, and up to the length of the campaign for the effect to resolve; and NetHack where I guess a scroll of genocide could let you specify "social media CEO" if such an NPC existed in the game.
What I hate about all these new AI verification services is that I wouldn't even be surprised if they are using verification data and pictures to train their own AI models. Wasn't there a video on Lemmy somewhere the other day where it showed the AI company Discord was using? They went to their website and it was full of AI generated images and I think even text. I wonder where they got all that training data from... 🤔
Within 3-days every child in Australia will know how to fool this thing.
Even if this was 100% accurate, which it obviously can't be, what's stopping someone who's under 16 from just using someone else's hand? Seems little better than the classic verification method of entering your birth date.
The elderly hand market is about to see a steep increase in purchases. What about all the elderly who will loose their hands, we all saw how bad it was when people were stealing catalytic converters. 😓
/s since a chunk of users can’t read sarcasm lol.
Wow. Literally hand-waving (and I mean "literally" in the literal way). I wonder what spurious correlation they’ll come up with next.
lmao they really decided to use AI slop for this. amazing lobbying by whatever startup is about to get this massive contract
Just hand wave it all away.
How long before I can use ASL to prompt inject an age verification machine?
I'll slightly nitpick the claim about the central ID register, because you can do a lot of this stuff decentralized with smart IDs.
I imagine it works like this: You somehow get your hands on a certificate that reads "yo, the controller of the key pair with public key a4c6... is over 18 - signed, new south wales records agency". You hook up your smart card to pass some cryptographic test, and voilá: you proved you have the ID of an adult and know their PIN.
Not that I advocate for IDing everytime you visit a website, but I guess I'd be fine with it for ordering weed online. I expect we'll get something like it in the EU, if we decide not to go full fucking surveillance state.
controller of the key pair
never.
These are not people who are going to do things correctly, let alone doing complex things correctly. They are absolutely going to come up with some hamfisted bullshit, there is no way they are not. If they really try to do this, the most likely version is a central ID register but it's privatised.
I mean, doesn't somebody still need to validate that those keys only get to people over 18? Either you have a decentralized authority that's more easily corrupted or subverted or else you have the same privacy concerns at certificate issuance rather than at time of site access.
The point would be, to roll it all into the ID issuing process. I think most EU IDs already have cryptographic identities built in. The certificate issuing should probably be a state service as well. The alternative would probably be, just mail your birth certificate and a 3D scan of your anus to the private age verification provider of your choice.
It of course all falls back to a central state authority. But the process wouldn't have to be more centralized and privacy-invasive than state IDs already are. Control of resident data could be kept at municipality level, and you wouldn't need a central approver, that gets a running feed of all my age-restricted activities.
Before I sound like I'm soying over ID verification, I'll add that all this junk can become insidious very quick, if it becomes easy to implement and gets used everywhere. I also detest beyond measure that my ID currently stores a scan of my fingerprint, and I hope the court-ordered deadline makes that shit illegal again in 2027.