AI will be used to estimate age of asylum seekers from next year

jl6

> In the year ending March 2026, more than 6,400 migrants claiming to be children were age assessed at the border, with 43% found to be adults, according to Home Office data. Whatever method the border force used to determine this, I cannot imagine how AI is going to be more accurate.

idle_zealot

The point of this is unambiguously to use technology as an accountability sink. You can't have a human eyeball age and call that a "process." You want a machine to point to instead. Its accuracy or lack thereof is immaterial to anyone who would seriously suggest using it. As ever, this is the real risk of "AI"; not the technology itself so much as the technology-as-social-construct. A machine oracle we can abdicate decisions to with a facade of neutrality. In this case, the facade is painting over the underlying motivation which is to reject asylum claims. You could imagine a world in which it is instead used to scan and fast-track claims through an automated and unaccountable process, but the form of the deployment has baked-in the outcome and interests of the powerful. Don't be surprised if there's another automated AI system that totally-pinky-promise-for-sure validates that rich tourists aren't terrorists so they can walk through security unmolested and another system that uses AI to flag "suspicious behavior" for the proles. The outcome is baked in, the AI just provides plausibility and legitimacy.

SilverElfin

Reminds me of the story of this dentist in Sweden who was fired for raising concerns about how 80% of migrant children he was treating were actually adults, based on their teeth: https://www.dental-tribune.com/news/dental-hygienist-fired-f...

josefritzishere

I'm sure that won't be misused at all.

ggm

Australia has a torrid history of misjudged age by wrist bone tests (fused? Infused?) Massive payouts for misstatements attributing adulthood to kids from illegal Indonesian fishing boats and jailing them in adult prisons.

hermitcrab

How would you train a system like this? Presumably you are going to need quite a few subjects of each ethnicity. Where are you going to find these people? You can't use asylum seekers, as you can't be sure about their real age.

skywhopper

So much time, money, energy wasted on being cruel. It’s shameful.

dmitrygr

This is a long-solved problem and can be sone cheaply without AI: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11122822/

NotGMan

The funnier part is that people are being let it without the gov crosschecking their identity with the government they are from and just being like "yeah you look ok, come in".

ProllyInfamous

Twenty years ago, I spent a brief period observing Chicagoland's immigrant halfway houses. The majority of the "juvenile" males were adults claiming such, and the detention facilities couldn't really do anything more than let thirty year olds co-mingle with actual children (e.g: actual teenagers don't have full dentition (already with years of decay on their third molars). Definitely didn't seem right, and we definitely didn't let females (of any age) alone inside.