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Comment by Jonovono

11 hours ago

For some reason ChatGPT has suddenly started thinking i'm a teen. Every answer it starts out "Since you are a teen I will..." and prompts me to upload an ID to show my age. I'm 35.

15 comments

Jonovono

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jayelem  8 hours ago

OpenAI demanded I prove my age in November 2025. I’m an educated 50 year old and had been paying for the service for over a year. When they insisted I prove my age I went through two layers of support but got nowhere. They insisted I go through their verification process. I refused and cancelled my subscription. This may be a losing battle but I’m not going to upload a photo to these services.

samename  10 hours ago

Does OpenAI have an incentive to get age prediction "wrong" so that more people "verify" their ages by uploading an ID or scanning their face, allowing "OpenAI" to collect more demographic data just in time to enable ads?

  • BatteryMountain  3 hours ago

    YES. They all do. Everyone is dripping to get their hands on your biometric data and medical info.

    • xyzzy123  1 hour ago

      I have worked in this space, and my experience was that usually age / identity verification is driven by regulatory or fraud requirements. Usually externally imposed.

      Product managers hate this, they want _minimum_ clicks for onboarding and to get value, any benefit or value that could be derived from the data is miniscule compared to the detrimental effect on signups or retention when this stuff is put in place. It's also surprisingly expensive per verification and wastes a lot of development and support bandwidth. Unless you successfully outsource the risk you end up with additional audit and security requirements due to handling radioactive data. The whole thing is usually an unwanted tarpit.

      1 reply →

aargh_aargh  3 hours ago

> simple way to confirm their age and restore their full access with a selfie through Persona, a secure identity-verification service

The normalization of identity verification to use internet services is itself a problem. It's described much better than I could by EFF here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/so-youve-hit-age-gate-...

  • owisd  1 hour ago

    The EFF are fighting a losing battle:

    > we hope we’ll win in getting existing ones overturned and new ones prevented.

    All the momentum is in the other direction and not slowing down. There are valid privacy concerns, but, buried in this very article, the EFF admit that it’s possible to do age-gating in a privacy-preserving way:

    > it’s possible to only reveal your age information when you use a digital ID. If you’re given that choice, it can be a good privacy-preserving option

    If they want to take a realistic approach to age-gating they should be campaigning to make this approach only option.

sunrunner  10 hours ago

"How do you do, fellow kids? Err...skibidi toilet?" That should work, it's at least three years old now I think?