UK border officials to use AI to verify ages of child asylum seekers

Officials are to start using artificial intelligence to help estimate the age of asylum seekers who say they are children. Angela Eagle, the immigration minister, said on Tuesday the government would test technology that judges a person's age based on their facial features. It is the latest example of Labour ministers turning to AI to help solve problems with public services without spending significant amounts of money. The decision was announced on the same day that David Bolt, the chief inspector of borders and immigration, published a highly critical report into the haphazard way in which officials estimated the age of new arrivals. Eagle said in a written statement to parliament: "We have concluded that the most cost-effective option to pursue is likely to be facial age estimation, whereby AI technology – trained on millions of images where an individual's age is verifiable – is able to produce an age estimate with a known degree of accuracy for an individual whose age is unknown or disputed.