Colorado students want stronger state regulations of AI, social media

Splendid. Colorado's youth have extracted themselves from the neon sludge of their feeds just long enough to march to the Capitol and demand that somebody regulate the artificial intelligence they have already been de facto beta-testing for a decade. What do they get for their civics-class initiative? The one-two of Republican Rep. Brandi Bradley's legislative imagination: age verification and parental consent for social media. Nothing says 'we have heard your concerns about generative models and runaway platforms' quite like asking a twelve-year-old to borrow his mother's credit card for the privilege of watching a video.

You can picture the scene: earnest students, armed with statistics and personal anecdotes, pitching a regulatory framework for a technology that is writing essays, faking faces, and eroding any shared sense of reality. And the state's answer is the same two policies that every panic cycle has produced since 2005, regurgitated with the enthusiasm of a slot machine paying out in tokens. Age verification and parental consent are the security theatre of digital parenting — they make adults feel responsible while doing precisely nothing to the sixteen-year-old who will simply find a Canadian postcode and a click of 'I am 18'. Bradley has 'expressed interest', which in political speak means she has acknowledged the problem in a way that costs nothing and commits to even less.

The furthest irony? This is framed as strengthening regulation of AI. In what universe is the legislative response to a technology that can clone voices, write code, and manipulate voters to ask people to tick a box saying they are old enough? The students asked for an actual guardrail; they are being offered a sticker. Meanwhile, somewhere, the companies building these systems are guaranteed to be delighted, because nothing clears the runway for unaccountable tech like a legislature that cannot distinguish between a data protection issue and a school trip permission slip. So bravo, Colorado. You have shown the next generation that when they ask for the moon, their representatives will lob back a rubber ball with a smiley face drawn on it. The kids are doomed, but at least their parents will know who agreed to it.