I am a 38 year old woman

Holy shit that’s bad. You’re literally more than double the age limit and it still didn’t do the right thing. That’s beyond even “looks young for their age” territory into just “catastrophic failure of the system”. Out of interest though…in your own opinion (or the opinion of people who know you IRL), do you at least look rather young for your age?

That means millions of people will be incorrectly flagged as minors and potentially lose access to entire regions of the internet

And the other way around. You can guarantee there’ll be some children who are not supposed to get through the system who nonetheless will do so. And you can also guarantee that these will mostly be non-white, so whatever harms the content that’s being blocked is supposed to do will be done predominantly to minority communities.

I’ve said it before and I will say it every time this comes up. The only acceptable way this system should work is via parental controls. Operating systems should be able to store a user’s age, and apps & websites should be able to access that age via an API. Parents should be able to set their child’s age in that system and lock it with a password so that the child can’t edit it. That removes any possibility that shitty AI will fuck things up for people. It removes any privacy concerns associated with uploading government ID. It literally addresses all the concerns people could have with the system, beyond the very idea of the system itself.