UK Home Office uses AI age estimation for asylum seekers – how accurate is the technology?

Starting next year, the Interior Ministry plans to use AI-powered facial age estimation to determine the age of asylum seekers. At the British border, deciding whether someone is 17 or 19 is a consequential judgment. Get it wrong and a vulnerable child will lose the legal protection to which they are entitled. But if it’s wrong the other way around, an adult is entering a system designed for minors.

Is this technology ready for such a risky decision?

When estimating facial age, a photo is fed into an AI system that goes through multiple levels of analysis, recognizing increasingly subtle patterns in the image. It is based on millions of photos of people whose ages are already known. Over time, the model learns to associate patterns in a face with likely age groups: skin texture, depth of lines around the eyes, bone structure, and soft tissue distribution.

This is different from facial recognition, which detects who someone is based on facial recognition…