How is an AI-generated profile picture going to circumvent an ID lookup? States aren't considering facial recognition for age verification; they're going to require affirmative proof in the form of a state or federal ID that can be looked up.

(And note: on a policy level, this is fundamentally different from your neighborhood's bar having a conveniently broken ID reader: an online service can't meaningfully claim to lack the connectivity needed for ID lookups.)

> an online service can't meaningfully claim to lack the connectivity needed for ID lookups

Partial connectivity outages happen literally every day. Most people don’t notice. Websites like “down for everyone or just me”, or uptime monitors that monitor from dozens of different source locations, exist because of this.

I don't think this addresses the point: if you can connect to a service, then laws like this will require them to make an ID challenge. If you can't connect, then it's a moot point.

The service itself can't say that it can't connect to you, because it's an online service and you're trivially connected to it.

You can't Midjourney a valid matching name and government ID number

You can't ChatGPT a database entry in a government server, either

Obviously, but either you need to do a gov ID lookup (which, is it even possible/scalable/feasible JSUT for age checks?) or need to keep the ID proofs for an audit. I've only really seen ID checks for financial apps/services where proof of exact identity is required, not of age.

Probably no feasible in the US because of political reasons, but technical I think it could be done similar to how gamling works in Denmark.

You have a government SSO solution (2auth?) called NemID / MitID that is normally used for Banking[1], doctor or hospital appointment, library, student loans and what not.

But if you want to gamble on a Danish online casino you also have to verify your account with it. You can even set yourself on an exclusion list, and will be banned from all Danish online casinos. [2]

What is JSUT?

[1] No matter what bank you are at, same login, pretty neat

[2] https://www.spillemyndigheden.dk/en/rofus#-rofus-

It's already scalable and feasible: ID.me

No but people are probably going to find that an entire school has a picture of their ID because their kid made a quick copy and shared it with their friends to access those sites.