‘Racist’ AI Age-Detection Puts Migrant Children at Risk, Charity Warns

Imprecise and ‘racist’ AI technology set to be used to determine the age of migrants arriving in the UK will lead to solo children being housed with adults, human rights groups have warned.  

Ministers have been urged to pause the introduction of the age-detection software, which has repeatedly been found to feature a strong bias against Black children, the Guardian reported. 

The government has acknowledged that even the most advanced versions of these systems have at least a 30-month margin of error.

In May, the Home Office announced a contract for a facial-recognition system developed by German firm Cognitec that consistently found sub-Saharan Africans to be older than they actually were, an investigation by Lighthouse Reports found. 

Children who have experienced trauma – including war, poverty and challenging migration journeys – may also appear visibly aged, the Refugee and Migrant Children’s Consortium said. 

Last year, 755 children were incorrectly identified as adults after being screened upon arrival in the UK, according to Home Office data cited by the Helen Bamber Foundation.

Maddie Harris, of the Humans for Rights Network, said the charity had already worked with hundreds of children who had been mistakenly placed into the adult migrant system as a result of age-detection screenings. 

Harris called the use of AI software a “cheap process” that would do nothing to correct the number of child migrants funnelled into the adult system. 

Petra Molnar, co-founder of the advocacy group Migration and Tech Monitor, compared the AI screening systems to a form of eugenics. “The context really matters here,” she told the Guardian.

“We know that trauma ages you. We know that malnutrition, dehydration, torture – even just the journey itself – has physical impacts on your face, on your body.

“It’s effectively ‘neo-phrenology’ by categorising people based on physical features,” she said.