Manisha Krishnan: So I think it’s kind of important to contextualize this because this is happening at a time where we’re seeing age verification being applied to a range of industries from porn to video games, and companies are going about it in different ways. And while I think there obviously is a lot to be concerned about with young people having unfettered access to ChatGPT, I think these efforts always raise a lot of questions like how is age going to be verified? Where’s that data going to be stored? Even the idea of something inappropriate flagging someone’s parents or the authorities, what is appropriate?
Zoë Schiffer: Right.
Manisha Krishnan: I can definitely see why suicide would be something that you’d want to flag, but maybe there’s other things that the authorities or someone’s parents may not be helpful in every situation. And I guess I’m thinking more about when we go into young people’s exploration of their sexual orientation, just as one example as the culture war topic that’s big right now. So maybe I’m getting too ahead of myself, but those are some of the questions that come to mind.
Zoë Schiffer: That was immediately what came to mind for me, especially because you specifically report on the adult content industry, and I feel like this issue always comes up there where it’s what’s the trade-off between privacy and keeping people safe? But when it comes to young people, it really feels like the privacy conversation goes out the window and regulators are much more inclined to be like, safety comes first, and we might not necessarily care if we’re degrading privacy in some kind of fundamental way.
Manisha Krishnan: Yeah, with the whole porn conversation too, Pornhub obviously has a litany of controversy, but at this point, because they’ve been in trouble so much, they’ve buttoned up a lot of their regulations. And now, in response to the age verification stuff, they’ve removed themselves. So you’re also like, “Am I opening up a vacuum to other maybe more nefarious or irresponsible sites?” There’s always something that will crop up in replacement of something else.
Zoë Schiffer: Well, we’ll wait to see how OpenAI continues to handle this. Staying on the topic of AI for one moment, our next story is about how US tech giants are investing billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the UK. Our colleague, Natasha Bernal, reported that Microsoft and NVIDIA announced that they’ll be investing up to $45 billion in the form of data centers and AI research. This comes on the heels of another joint venture from NVIDIA, Nscale and OpenAI that’s also aimed at boosting AI infrastructure in the country. Earlier this week, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, and NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, traveled with President Trump to the UK during his state visit and then we got a whole bunch of announcements about all of these billion-dollar investments.
Manisha Krishnan: Honestly, one of my first reactions was is this just another form of American tech imperialism spreading and how do the Brits feel about this and what is the underlying motivation for these tech companies to make all these announcements? Do they actually want to invest that much in the UK? That would make sense, but also is it to appease Trump?
