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Instagram is testing an AI that checks your age with a selfie scan. Not perfect

(CNN Business)Instagram confirms the age of the youngest user, including using artificial intelligence to analyze photos I'm testing a new way to do it. Estimate the age of the user.

Meta-owned Instagramsaid in a blog post on Thursday, and AI is testing three new things to check a user's age on a photo-sharing site. This is one of the methods. When editing birthdays from under 18 to over 18 on Instagram, users must use one of the options to verify their age. Instagram is initially testing these options for users in the United States. has already required that the user indicate the age ofwhen they start using the service, andis otherwise using AI, is the user a child? Determine if you are an adult.
JACKSONVILLE, OREGON - JUNE 19, 2019: A young woman uses her smartphone as she sits outside a coffee shop in Jacksonville, Oregon. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
JACKSONVILLE, OREGON - JUNE 19, 2019: A young woman uses her smartphone as she sits outside a coffee shop in Jacksonville, Oregon. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)

Jacksonville, Oregon, June 19, 2019: Young women outside using their smartphones A coffee shop in Jacksonville, Oregon, sitting in. (Photo by Robert Alexander / Getty Images)

This move is a continuous push to ensure the youngest of photo sharing apps Part ofUsers will see age-appropriate content. Less than a year after Facebook whistleblower disclosures expressed concern about the impact of the platform on young usersLast year,whistleblowers, Frances Haugen , Showed that social media sites are aware of how mental health and body image can be compromised, especially among teenage girls.
This technology is provided by a company calledYotibased in London. Instagram's blog postanimated videoshows how Yoti's AI age estimation works. The user is instructed to take a video selfie on their smartphone (according to Yoti, this procedure serves as a way to verify that the actual person is included in the resulting image), and Instagram takes the image of that selfie. Share with the company. Yoti's AI first detects the presence of a face in a photo and then scrutinizes the facial features to determine the age of the person.
Julie Dawson, Yoti's Chief Policy and Regulatory Officer, told CNN Business that the AI ​​was trained on a dataset containing images of a person's face and the date the person was born. Told. (DocumentThe company, released in May to explain the company's technology, states that it was trained in "Millions of Diverse Face Images".)

"When a new face appears, it analyzes the face's pixel level and then spits out a number — age estimation with confidence," Dawson said. Once the quote is complete, Yoti and Instagram will remove the selfie video and the still images taken from it.

Checking a user's age can be a daunting task for tech companies. This is because many users may not have a government-issued photo ID card that they can verify.

Karl Rikanek, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and director of the Face Aging Group Research Lab at the school, believes Yoti's technology is a great application for AI.

"Trying to protect children is a worthwhile effort," he said.

While such technologies can be useful for Instagram, it can be difficult to accurately estimate age from photos. Adolescents (which change the structure of a person's face) and skin tone, says Rikanek. And gender.

According to Yoti'srecent document, the technology averages 13 to 17 years old, the age of darker children than lighter ones. The accuracy in estimating is slightly lower. tone. According to Yoti data, women aged 13 to 17 years, whose skin color was classified into the two darkest shades on the Fitzpatrick scale, averaged 1.91 years off. Classify skin color. In contrast, women of the same age group had an average error of 1.41 years, with two lightest shades of skin on the scale. According to the document, for children between the ages of 13 and 17, technology estimates of how old they were were on average 1.56 years off. (For all teens, the average error rate is 1.52 years.)

This means that there are actually many errors, said an assistant professor at Western University in Ontario. One Luke Stark said. Canada studying the ethical and social impacts of AI. "In any case, we still have a mean absolute error of one to one and a half years," he said.

Several CNN employees (all adults over the age of 25) have tried theonline demo of Yoti's age estimation technique. The demo differs from what Instagram users experience in taking selfies rather than short videos, and as a result, age range estimates are made rather than specific age estimates, and Yoti's chief marketing officer One Chris Field said.

The results were mixed. For some reporters, the estimated age range was on target, but for others it was years off. For example, one editor is actually in his mid-30s and is estimated to be between the ages of 17 and 21.

Among other issues, Stark is also concerned that technology contributes to so-called "surveillance creep."

"It's certainly a problem, because it is conditional on people assuming they will be monitored and evaluated," he said.