You know what’s retarded? Forcing websites to use AI-powered age verification for adult content.
Yes, I said it.
Not because I support exposing minors to explicit content—I don’t—but because I support actual functional technology and digital self-ownership, not whatever dystopian brain fog some clueless politician cooked up between meetings with telecom lobbyists.
Here’s why mandatory AI age checks are one of the dumbest ideas since “click here to win a free iPad.”
1. AI Needs Power—and Lots of It
Let’s start with the obvious. AI isn’t magic. It runs on silicon, not sorcery. Every age check done via facial analysis, behavioral profiling, or conversational inference runs on data centers that suck up electricity, bandwidth, and processor time. Multiply that by billions of users, and you’re talking about a carbon footprint the size of a small country—to do what?
Tell a 16-year-old they’re not allowed to click on a pair of digital boobs?
2. Big Tech Consolidation Is the Real Porn Filter
When you force independent sites to use expensive AI verification tools, you create a market that only Big Tech can survive in.
This means smaller sites either die off or get absorbed.
The result? A centralized, sanitized internet where the rules are made by corporate committees and enforced by poorly tuned algorithms.
Congratulations, you just killed the last shreds of the decentralized, anarchic, DIY web—the one that let creators and communities thrive on their own terms.
You think AI age checks will protect children?
They’ll just protect monopolies.
3. Even the Best Human Still Needs to Ask for ID
Let’s say your AI system is world-class—trained on millions of data points, tuned to perfection. What’s the ceiling?
Being as good as a veteran bartender.
And what do even the best bartenders do when a baby-faced 21-year-old orders a drink?
They ask for ID.
Because guesswork – whether human or AI – is not a replacement for real verification.
AI will misfire.
It will approve some 14-year-old with good lighting and reject some 30-year-old with a babyface and a VPN.
If even humans need ID to be sure, why are we pretending a bot can do better?
4. We Already Had a Better System in the 1990s
It’s called PICS – the Platform for Internet Content Selection.
This was built into Internet Explorer (back when Microsoft actually innovated). It let parents set filters for nudity, violence, and other themes—with simple sliders. All a website had to do was add a meta tag to declare its rating.
No server-side AI.
No data harvesting.
No electric guzzling GPU farm just to say “yep, looks 18.”
PICS didn’t break the web.
AI mandates will.
5. This Is What Happens When Tech-Illiterates Write Tech Laws
Let’s be real: the people pushing mandatory AI verification for adult content are not engineers.
They’re talkers.
They’re legal consultants, bureaucrats, and risk-averse cowards who understand neither infrastructure nor architecture.
Expecting them to write digital policy is like putting draft dodgers in charge of military operations—a guaranteed disaster.
Their solution isn’t elegant, efficient, or scalable. It’s expensive, exclusionary, and dumb.
Final Thought
Protecting children is noble. But doing it with bloated, inefficient mandates that violate user freedom and destroy small sites is not protection—it’s performative authoritarianism.
Want real protection?
Use client-side tools. Empower parents. Encourage metadata labeling. Don’t outsource morality to datacenters and CEOs.
