The UK Home Office is preparing to roll out AI that guesses people’s ages from their faces.

You’ve all seen the photos. Some bloke who has crossed the Channel is being presented as a child, and everyone with working eyes is thinking the same thing.

There have been real cases where adult asylum seekers have ended up in schools, with obvious safeguarding implications for children.

In a recent government document, Labour said it plans to use Facial Age Estimation, or FAE, which uses machine learning to estimate a person’s age within seconds by analysing a facial photograph.

“Asylum seekers frequently arrive at the UK border with no official identity documents and so it can sometimes be difficult to know for sure which are children,” it said.

“It is also important for the proper safeguarding of children, with the potential to wrongly place a young person in adult environments or to allow an adult to mix with children, such as in a care or school setting,” it added.

The truth is that many people crossing the Channel t later claim asylum throw their identification into the sea, so in some cases there is no reliable way of knowing who they are, where they are from, or how old they really are.

The Home Office said it is testing the technology throughout 2026, with a view to implement it at the border in 2027.

It’s one of those things that the left like to say never happens.

But a 30-year-old male asylum seeker from the Middle East spent six weeks as a Year 11 student at Stoke High School in Ipswich, Suffolk. “Lessons were learnt” said the school.

And of course, the government is definitely not going to abuse this AI, is it?

READ MORE: Police Plan Five-Fold Expansion of Live Facial Recognition Tech in ‘Panopticon’ Push