The Folly of AI for Age Verification

Abstract

In the near future a governmental body will be asked to allow companies to use AI for age verification. If they allow it the resulting system will both be easily circumvented and disproportionately misclassify minorities and low socioeconomic status users. This is predictable by showing that other very similar systems (facial recognition and remote proctoring software) have similar issues despite years of efforts to mitigate their biases. These biases are due to technical limitations both of the AI models themselves and the physical hardware they are running on that will be difficult to overcome below the cost of government ID-based age verification. Thus in, the near future, deploying an AI system for age verification is folly.