By Joshua Tyler
| Published
YouTube recently announced it’ll be implementing a new kind of AI-driven age identification, and it won’t need you to give it any information to tell it how old you are. They can tell your age without asking by observing patterns in internet use.
On the surface, this is a good thing because the reality is that there has never been meaningful age filtering on the internet. It’s probably why most modern kids now look and act like traumatized, brain-dead zombies. That’s what watching snuff videos at age eight will do to you.
If you think age is the only thing our internet overlords know about you, just by watching your click history, you haven’t been paying attention. We’re entering a world where tech companies know everything about every user on their platform, whether that user disclosed it or not. They know things you don’t know about yourself.
You can make many dystopian projections about where this will lead, but I’m not sure it’ll be a bad thing.
In the case of YouTube, you can bet they’re already using that data to curate your video feed. They know your IQ score and will likely start feeding you content specifically designed to appeal to your level of intellect.
This probably explains the recent, massive promotion of extremely low-effort, very dumb AI slop on the platform. YouTube now knows that most of you are dumbasses, and so it is giving you the kind of dumbass content people like you have always wanted.
Meanwhile, people with the intellect to enjoy something besides ingesting internet slop will get that higher-quality content without having to sort through all the garbage the Slop Eaters like to ingest. Whether there are enough smart people to make creating high-quality content economical is the question that has yet to be answered.
The biggest downside here is that the dumb are only going to get dumber. But the upside may be that the smart will get smarter than ever. Or maybe we’ll all end up living in some sort of Idiocracy hellhole. Yeah, that’s the most likely scenario.
