AI to determine if the person watching porn is too young. Here's how

Pornography is freely available on the internet, and is often accessed by children. To protect the young ones from accessing inappropriate porn content online, Britain has now proposed a new age-check guidance that may use artificial intelligence.

How will AI do that?

As per a Reuters report, Artificial Intelligence will evaluate if a viewer looks of age. It would do so by analysing the viewer's feature. This, as per the report, would likely require the user to click and upload a selfie.

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This comes as Britain on Tuesday (Dec 5th) recommended a new age-check guidance to protect children from accessing pornography online. The nation recently passed the Online Safety Act that requires websites and applications that display and/or publish pornographic material to ensure that children under the age of 18 years do not stumble across pornography on their service.

"Regardless of their approach, we expect all services to offer robust protection to children from stumbling across pornography, and also to take care that privacy rights and freedoms for adults to access legal content are safeguarded," said media regulator Ofcom CEO Melanie Dawes, as reported by the news agency.

Among its guidance are other proposals like photo identification matching, making it mandatory for users to upload a photo ID such as passport or driving licence to prove their age, and even credit card checks. Further suggestions include open banking — where to confirm that they are over 18, users can authorise their bank to share information with online porn sites.

The regulator, as per Reuters, spoke against weak verification methods like self-declaration of age, online payment methods that do not have any age restrictions, and disclaimers or warnings. It said that these would no longer meet the standards in its new guidance, which is expected to be published in early 2025.

Britain and pornography

In Britain, the legal age to watch porn is 18 years or more. However, as per a 2021-2022 study by the Office of the Children's Commissioner for England, on average, children first access pornographic content online at the young age of 13. Nearly a quarter of children actually stumble across porn at an even younger age — around 11 years. Shockingly, one in 10 people reported seeing their first porn content at the tender young age of nine years.

In spite of that, not everyone is in favour of mandatory age verification. The Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think tank, contends that it threatens user privacy and that by increasing the amount of sensitive data held by third parties, this could potentially expose users to breaches and abuse.

(With inputs from agencies)