Age Verification Is Sweeping Gaming. Is It Ready for the Age of AI Fakes?

Ash, a UK-based 20-year-old who requested his last name not be used, tells WIRED he was able to pass verification using God of War’s photo mode with main character Kratos. “I didn’t expect [verification] to work because of Kratos’ white skin and beard, but it worked first try,” he says. Another Discord user in the UK, who goes by Antsy online, says he achieved the same results with Arma 3 and a mod that allows you to pose characters. “I figured out I could simply by trying, as all people should,” he tells WIRED. “Arma 3 characters look very poor, nowhere near realistic, so I thought it would be a solid experiment to solidify or challenge my views on this technology.” Antsy says he and his friends consider this kind of tech “a challenge” they try to bypass. “I am very pro internet safety,” he says. “I believe, though, that it should not be the internet’s job to parent and protect its younger users.”

Video game characters from several games worked. In a video from YouTuber beebreadtech, he’s able to swiftly get an adult age rating repeating Siyan’s steps with Death Stranding. Other Discord users WIRED talked to say they were able to do so with games like Days Gone, Baldur’s Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, The Sims 4, Cyberpunk 2077, Days Gone, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Gray Zone Warfare. Some say they even successfully used Garry’s Mod, a game with slapstick physics and character models resembling something from a fever dream.

Discord has not yet responded to WIRED’s request for comment.

Maimon says there are too many possible loopholes with age verification that people can slip through. “The industry is trying to find solutions to the issue of AI deepfakes and and and live AIs,” he says. That may mean relying on a combination of factors that look at a person’s associated information like telephone numbers, addresses and more. “You need to rely more heavily on historical evidence for the existence of the individual,” Maimon says, “and put less of an emphasis on checkpoints like driver licenses, photos, livenessness tests, and so on.”

Maimon says that bad actors are adept at bypassing these kinds of technologies. “Criminals are always like 7 to 12 months ahead of us in terms of their ability to find vulnerabilities and bypass some of the technologies out there,” he says. Even without generative AI, people can still sell videos of their faces to pass age verification.

Even photo IDs aren’t bulletproof. “The quality of a [fake] driver license—it’s just impeccable,” Maimon says. All the watermarks, the UV lights, all the security, even the right plastic material on which the driver license is being printed on—even that criminals now have access to.”

For legitimate IDs, there’s an issue with minors and who owns one. WIRED previously asked Roblox chief safety officer Matt Kaufman about 13-year-olds—the minimum age for Roblox to unlock some of its features—that might not have government-issued IDs. “That is a problem,” Kaufman told WIRED at the time, adding that in North America and the United States, it’s uncommon for people so young to have them.