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.
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.
I don't get it. They're doing everything they can to create roadblocks to adoption. They don't accept prepaid cards, they restrict certain models behind extended verification processes and the list goes on. They got a lucky head-start and seem to have assumed they've built some impenetrable moat.
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?
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.
Depends on what product they manage, at least if they're good at their job. A product manager for social media company know it's not just about "least clicks to X", but about a lot of other things along the way.
Surely the product managers at OpenAI are briefed on the potential upsides with having the concrete ID for all users.
Making someone produce an identity document or turn on their camera for a selfie absolutely tanks your funnel. It's dire.
The effect is strong enough that a service which doesn't require that will outcompete a service which does. Which leads to nobody doing it in competitive industries unless a regulator forces it for everybody.
Companies that must verify will resort to every possible dark pattern to try to get you over this massive "hump" in their funnel; making you do all the other signup before demanding the docs, promising you free stuff or credit on successful completion of signup, etc. There is a lot of alpha in being able to figure out ways to defer it, reduce the impact or make the process simpler.
There is usually a fair bit of ceremony and regulation of how verification data is used and audits around what happens to it are always a possibility. Sensible companies keep idv data segregated from product data.
> Making someone produce an identity document or turn on their camera for a selfie absolutely tanks your funnel. It's dire.
Yes, but again, a good product manager wouldn't just eyeball the success percentage of a specific funnel and call it a day.
If your platform makes money by subtle including hints to what products to prefer, and forcing people to upload IDs as a part of the signup process, and you have the benefit of being the current market leader, then it might make sense for the company to actually make that sacrifice.
> No one wants to upload an ID and instead is moving to a competitor!
Comments on the internet is rarely proof of anything, even so here.
If no one wants to upload an ID, we'd see ChatGPT closing in a couple of weeks, or they'll remove the ID verification. Personally, I don't see either of those happening, but lets wait and see if you're right or not. Email in the profile if you want to later brag about being right, I'll be happy to be corrected then :)
The average HN user maybe, but elsewhere, I see people uploading their IDs without a second thought. Especially those in the "chromebooks and google docs in school" generation who've been conditioned against personal data privacy their whole lives
There is no way that the likes of OpenAI can make a credible case for this. What fraud angle would there be? If they were a bank then I can see the point.
Regulatory risk around child safety. DSA article 28 and stuff like that. Age prediction is actually the "soft" version; i.e, try not to bother most users with verification, but do enough to reasonably claim you meet requirements. They also get to control the parameters around how sensitive it is in response to the political / regulatory environment.
> 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.
The fight is not just about privacy, it is about freedom. Age-gating websites violates the freedom of people who are under a certain age. Young people have the same rights to free expression and information access as anyone else.
It’s more like saying you love painting, but you’re glad you no longer have to hike into the wilderness, crush minerals, boil oils, and invent pigments from scratch before you can put brush to canvas.
What scaling limitations, Gemini 3 shows us that is not over yet, and little brother flash is a hyper sparse, 1T parameter model (aiui) that is both fast and good
I agree with GP, Marcus has not been an accurate or significant voice, could care lass what he has to say about ai. He's not a practitioner anymore in my mind
(Realistically, Seedream 4 is the best at aesthetically pleasing generation, Nano Banana Pro is the best at realism and editing, and Seedream 4.5 is a very strong middleground between the two with great pricing)
gpt-image-1.5 feels like OpenAI doing the bare minimum to keep people from switching to Gemini every time they want an image.
Ah that sucks. I would also guess that an attractive 28 year on a global walking adventure might have left a few kids in his wake. He should probably avoid 23andMe.
Not sure if there will be much interest for this here. But i've been building this because I never know what to wear, and shopping sites don't really help. I may find a shirt I like but then I still have to figure out what to wear with it that would look like.
So I made this where a have outfits generated that should follow basic fashion rules and color theory. You say where you are going, weather and other details and it will generate an outfit that you can then swipe on like Tinder to refine it. Once you are happy with the outfit, you can shop the complete look!
I've done a bunch of optimizations to get outfit generation to be ~3s (sometimes slower as i'm trying different models).
Anyways, thought i'd share this here as i'd love feedback if anyone else has this problem. For myself, it's made some outfits that I really like!
I love the picture painted of an ikea for fashion. I’m working on an idea where instead of searching for individual garments you first create the outfit (using gen ai) and then shop the complete look (I basically reverse search the pieces of the generated outfit to find similar items)
But it would be so cool if you could like print the fabric pieces and send them and the person assembles their created outfit.
That's a really cool idea! I'm not sure of the specifics, but I believe digital printing on fabric isn't outrageously expensive, and being custom made per layout would let you hide a lot of the patch-like structure with the actual design. (I imagine it would be a lot less noticeable if a seam follows a line in the design, or a pleat like in the dress examples from the paper) Insanely cool value prop to get some of these patches in the mail, that assemble into a choice of a few different garments, all pairing well together. And if you like a fabric/pattern from a prior piece, now it can be a highlight in another garment.
Please make a men's size+cut version if you do that, you have an interested customer #1!
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