YouTube announced on Tuesday that it will begin to use artificial intelligence to estimate the ages of users in the US, in order to show them age-appropriate content.
The rollout of the new feature comes one day after Australia’s government announced it would ban children under 16 from using YouTube and less than a week after the UK implemented sweeping age checks on content on social networks.
YouTube’s AI age verification on its home turf indicates it is putting into place a form of compliance with the Australian and UK requirements, despite its persistent opposition to age-check requirements.
“Over the next few weeks, we’ll 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,” wrote James Beser, director of product management for YouTube Youth, in a blogpost titled Extending our built-in protections to more teens on YouTube.