The Home Office has announced that immigration officers will be using facial age estimation (FAE) technology next year to stop adult arrivals “posing as children”, said The Independent. But the government’s own advisers have warned that the AI tool is “hideously inaccurate”. 

How does FAE work?
AI-powered FAE tools have been used to prevent children from accessing age-restricted goods and services, including alcohol and adult-only online content. Now, “hardening politics around asylum” have opened a new market with “far higher stakes”: using AI to determine whether undocumented migrants are over 18, said Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with The Independent and Wired.

An AI system, “trained on millions of photographs of people whose ages are already known”, has learned to associate facial patterns with likely age ranges, said Oli Buckley, a cybersecurity professor at Loughborough University, on The Conversation. A photograph is analysed several times for “increasingly subtle patterns” in skin texture, depth of lines, bone structure and distribution of soft tissue to deliver a “probability distribution” age result that could be, for example, “most likely between 17 and 21”. 

But at the UK border, if you “get it wrong”, a “vulnerable child” could lose legal protections they’re entitled to, or an adult could enter “a system designed for minors”.

Could FAE get it wrong?
The technology has misclassified more than a third of 16-year-olds as adults, according to Lighthouse Reports. In some tests, it gave the wrong assessment in 70% of cases.

A separate, leaked report, which the Home Office tried to withhold, found the technology is least accurate when trying to assess migrants from countries such as Eritrea and Sudan. This led to accusations that the technology has “baked-in racial bias”, said The Independent. “Error rates are particularly high for female child migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa,” said Lighthouse Reports.

Will it still be used?
The Home Office said it has “rigorous processes in place to verify an individual’s age”. The tool provides “an additional source of information for immigration officers, and does not replace or overrule human judgement”.

But Anna Bacciarelli, senior technology researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Lighthouse Reports that this was of little reassurance: it’s “well established” that automation bias tends to make people trust a computer’s decision over their own judgement.

ITV has been accused of “unwitting sexism” after placing expert football pundit Emma Hayes in a “bureau-meets-countryside-kitchen” set for its World Cup coverage, said The Times. Hayes, who is head coach of the USA women’s team and who won seven Women’s Super League titles with Chelsea, has been given an analysis slot during the tournament’s new hydration breaks.

In “relegating” Hayes to a set resembling a kitchen and making her use chalk and a blackboard, rather than the more customary interactive digital tools, ITV bosses have risked “reinforcing sexist stereotypes”.

‘As lo-fi as humanly possible’
Hayes’ analysis has been “one of the triumphs of the tournament so far”, said Football365. ITV has “adroitly” leaned into her strengths by making the segment “as lo-fi as humanly possible”. Her blackboard insights gave “infinitely more value” than the “empty, lazy” cliches we are used to from the channel’s “tacticos”.

TV football coverage is now “dominated” by former players using “high-tech screens for analysis”, said Molly Hudson in The Times. So giving the football manager the “classic prop” makes sense. And, despite looking “a bit cheap”, the set had a “retro” feel, said Kathryn Batte in The Telegraph. ITV’s only failing is giving Hayes such a “short window” and not “maximising the air time of one of the best pundits at the tournament”.

‘Lose the blackboard’
“Hayes’ ­intellect shone,” said The Times’ editorial board. But without the “gizmos and graphics” afforded to her male colleagues, her “acute and informative” analysis was reduced to resemblances of “noughts and crosses”. “Lose the blackboard. She deserves better.”

Hayes is one of the “most decorated tacticians in world football”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. But the “inherently sexist optics” of positioning a female pundit in an “almost-kitchen” has “played into the hands of misogynist trolls”. Hayes offers a “class of punditry that football sorely needs”. She stands alongside other established commentators such as Karen Carney, Ellen White and Alex Scott – “as long as ITV doesn’t put them in a kitchen, that is”.

The western facade of the Parthenon in Athens, seen in its entirety for the first time in 220 years. External scaffolding has finally been removed from the 2,500-year-old temple after decades of renovation. Greece’s culture minister Lina Mendoni described the sight as “truly stunning”.

Angelos Tzortzinis / AFP / Getty Images 

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Trump has signed the worst deal in US history
Rohit Kachroo in The i Paper
When Donald Trump signed the “Memorandum of Understanding” with Iran, “applause came easily” from world leaders, writes ITV’s global security editor Rohit Kachroo. “Relief has a way of lowering standards”; after months of conflict and major economic disruption, “even an off-ramp made of cardboard appeared attractive”. But on the “defining refrain” of the conflict – preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon – “the language remains vague”. Trump’s deal is “not so much a triumph as an exercise in disaster avoidance”.

South Africa’s anti-migrant backlash
The Financial Times’ editorial board
When South Africa played Mexico in the World Cup this week, many Africans were rooting for Mexico, says the Financial Times. “Endemic unemployment” in South Africa has turned it into “a hostile environment” for migrants from other African nations, who are “regularly scapegoated for ‘taking jobs’”. But the continent’s planned “EU-style free trade area” is South Africa’s best hope of reviving its stagnant economy. Its politicians need to “drive home” the “pragmatic reasons” for sticking “to its pan-African principles”.

The sad death of tabloid English
Christopher Gage in The Spectator
Before the age of “Strava personal bests, and alcohol-free lager”, UK red-tops “served up a daily diet of love rats and busty babes often embroiled in something called ‘coke shame hell’”, writes Christopher Gage. This “punchy” vernacular, forged by the “brutal physics of the printing press”, was “Britain’s last great folk poetry”. But “with the death of print”, Tabloid English vanished. It could be “uncouth”, but its crudity had a “semblance of truth” not seen in today’s “language of the HR department”.