By Michaela Gordoni
Australia set the record straight for child safety when it banned social media use for anyone under 16. And now, it wants to expand that protection to search engines, app stores and AI services.
It’s priority is AI platforms like ChatGPT, which can provide self-harm information and graphic material. If companies didn’t implement age checks, they could face fines up to $35 million, Digital Trends reported.
“eSafety will use the full range of our powers where there is non-compliance,” a spokesperson for the Australia eSafety commissioner said, including “action in respect of gatekeeper services such as search engines and app stores that provide key points of access to particular services”.
Apple has already implemented age checks in its app store in regions such as Australia, Singapore and Brazil.
Related: Battle Rages Over Age Verification Laws — What Parents Should Know
Other countries are already on board. France, New Zealand, the UK and Spain are working on social media age restrictions, the UK with minimum ages and verification requirements.
ABC Australia reports search engines have until Dec. 27 to implement an age check technology. The search results for logged-in users under 18 will be filtered for pornography, high-impact violence, eating disorder-related content and more.
“It’s critical to ensure the layered safety approach…including on the app stores and at the device level — the physical gateways to the internet where kids sign up and first declare their ages,” said eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.
Unlike America, Australia has not yet experienced chatbot-linked violence or self-harm, but the regulator has said children as young as 10 talk to AI bots up to six hours a day.
eSafety is “concerned that AI companies are leveraging emotional manipulation, anthropomorphism and other advanced techniques to entice, entrance and entrench young people into excessive chatbot usage,” the spokesperson said.
ChatGPT, Replika and Claude have started rolling out age assurance systems or blanket filters. Character.AI recently halted open-ended chat for under-18s.
Elon Musk’s chat-based search tool Grok, which is under investigation for failure to stop synthetic sexualized images of children, still has no age assurance measures or content filters.
Lisa Given, director of RMIT University’s Centre for Human-AI Information Environments, said, “most of these tools are being designed without a view to potential harms and the need for those kinds of safety controls. It feels as though…we’re beta testing all of these things for these companies and they’re trying to see how far society is willing to be pushed.”
While some express concerns about the effectiveness of age-verification, the motives are in the right place. The bottom line is it’s about protecting children.
Read Next: Will This State Hold Apple and Google Responsible for Age Verification?
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