The Folly of AI for Age Verification

TL;DR

The paper argues that using AI for age verification is fundamentally flawed due to inherent biases and technical limitations, making it unreliable and unfair, especially for minorities and low socioeconomic groups.

Contribution

It highlights the parallels between AI age verification and other biased AI systems, emphasizing the persistent issues and technical challenges that cannot be easily resolved.

Findings

AI age verification systems are easily circumvented.

Such systems disproportionately misclassify minorities and low-income users.

Technical limitations make bias mitigation difficult below ID-based verification costs.

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.