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Our approach to age prediction

openai.com

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Re: Our approach to age prediction

#161

Post by knallfrosch »

sodafountan wrote: post #67
prox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But did it tell on what basis it made that assumption?

Yes, it listed a few of my past questions as reference points. I had asked some questions about Nintendo 64/Dreamcast and Gamecube games. It also used information I had asked it about programming languages and some work-related questions to guess my age. I don't know how OpenAI plans to do this going forward, just quickly read the article and figured that might be a good question to ask ChatGPT. Edit: I just followed…

Age is a must. Gender is too easy. You know what the problem is? These systems know your ethnicity and religion.

Re: Our approach to age prediction

#162

Post by thaumasiotes »

duskwuff wrote: post #159
jedberg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone remember the game Leisure Suit Larry? To get the full 18+ experience, you had to answer five trivia questions that only adults should know. But it turns out smart teens who like trivia knew most of them too (and you could just ask mom and dad, they had no clue why you were asking which President appeared on Laugh In).

Also, hilariously, a lot of those questions require a trip to Wikipedia (or a game guide) today. A lot of them reference bits of 1960s/1970s pop culture which are no longer common knowledge. https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...

A lot of them don't. Some appear to be specialized for children:

> Peter Piper picked pickled (peppers)

> How many molecules are there in a glass of water? (as many as there are)

There's also this one:

> Which is not a city in Mexico? (San Diego)

which appears to have been false at the time, and is still false now.

Re: Our approach to age prediction

#163

Post by sonofhans »

richwater wrote: post #70
sonofhans wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a thoughtful response and deserves discussion. Yes, certainly, OpenAI might get your age wrong. Yes, certainly, they’re signaling to advertisers. But consider OPs point — ChatGPT has become a safety-critical system. It is a tool capable of pushing a human towards terrible actions, and there are documented cases of it doing this. In that context, what is the responsibility of OpenAI to keep their product away…

> It is a tool capable of pushing a human towards terrible actions So is Catcher In The Rye and Birth of a Nation. > the most vulnerable, and the most easily influenced How exactly is age an indicator of vulnerability or subject-to-influence?

> So is Catcher In The Rye and Birth of a Nation.

No, those are books. Tools are different, particularly tools that talk back to you. Your analogy makes no sense.

> How exactly is age …

In my experience, 12-year-old humans are much easier to sway with pleasant-sounding bullshit than 24-year-old humans. Is your experience different?

Re: Our approach to age prediction

#164

Post by esafak »

jedberg wrote: post #96
sigmar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, would love to see the gen alphas tiktoking about what 401k questions to type into chatgpt

Anyone remember the game Leisure Suit Larry? To get the full 18+ experience, you had to answer five trivia questions that only adults should know. But it turns out smart teens who like trivia knew most of them too (and you could just ask mom and dad, they had no clue why you were asking which President appeared on Laugh In).

Spiro Agnew is a form of social disease, a jazz-fusion rock band, a former Vice President, the first woman in Congress?

Re: Our approach to age prediction

#165

Post by miki123211 »

samename wrote: post #33
JohnMakin wrote: post #4

Hard no. It's so easy to get "flagged" by opaque systems for "Age verification" processes or account lockouts that require giving far too much PII to a company like this for my liking. > Users who are incorrectly placed in the under-18 experience will always have a fast, simple way to confirm their age and restore their full access with a selfie through Persona, a secure identity-verification service. Yea, my linkedi…

The unfortunate reality is this isn't just corporations acting against user's interests, governments around the world are pushing for these surveillance systems as well. It's all about centralizing power and control.

Don't forget the journalists.

Facebook made journalists a lot less relevant, so anything that hurts Meta (and hence anything that hurts tech in general) is a good story that helps journalists get revenge and revenue.

"Think of the children", as much as it is hated on HN, is a great way to get the population riled up. If there's something that happens which involves a tech company and a child, even if this is an anecdote that should have no bearing on policy, the media goes into a frenzy. As we all know, the media (and their consumers) love anecdotes and hate statistics, and because of how many users most tech products have, there are plenty of anecdotes to go around, no matter how good the company's intentions.

Politicians still read the NY Times, who had reporters admit on record that they were explicitly asked to put tech in an unfavorable light[1], so if the NYT says something is a problem, legislators will try to legislate that problem away, no matter how harebrained, ineffective and ultimately harmful the solution is.

[1] https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192?lang=en

Re: Our approach to age prediction

#166

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

Retr0id wrote: post #83
Jensson wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it was just for ads they wouldn't even bother announcing it as a "feature", they'd just do it. Its a feature for advertisers, and investors also wanna know. Did you think you are the customer?

"you can target ads by demographic" is table stakes

Does this factoid contradict their motivation in publishing this information?

Re: Our approach to age prediction

#167

Post by Hoasi »

samename wrote: post #115
Jonovono wrote: post #98

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.

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?

Maybe they should start scanning users' irises.

Re: Our approach to age prediction

#168

Post by aargh_aargh »

Jonovono wrote: post #98

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.

> 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-...

Re: Our approach to age prediction

#170

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

sigmar wrote: post #9

>behavioral and account-level signals, including how long an account has existed, typical times of day when someone is active, usage patterns over time, and a user’s stated age. Surely they're using "history of the user-inputted chat" as a signal and just choosing not to highlight that? Because that would make it so much easier to predict age.

I also saw a reddit post once which showed that even if you type something and don't press enter, even that's logged in chatgpt

SO I am pretty sure that they might be using that information as well. I don't see any reason for them not to.

So if you wrote something to chatgpt and then removed it/ didn't ask it? Yea they might be using that history too.

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