A police force in the United Kingdom has admitted to relying on Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot in the fabrication of a faulty intelligence report.
Late last year, the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv played against the British Aston Villa in a game in Birmingham, U.K. Prior to the game, a Birmingham safety committee decided to not allow Maccabi Tel Aviv fans to attend the game, basing the decision on an intelligence report from West Midlands police deeming the match high-risk for hooliganism.
The details of that report were later heavily contested by government officials. Now, West Midlands police chief constable Craig Guildford has admitted that his subordinates relied on Microsoft Copilot to fabricate the report and failed to fact-check its findings.
Specifically, the report referred to a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the British soccer team West Ham that was completely hallucinated by Copilot. The two teams have never played against each other, and on the day of the imaginary game, West Ham had another game against the Greek team Olympiacos, according to the U.K. Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee.
“On Friday afternoon I became aware that the erroneous result concerning the West Ham v Maccabi Tel Aviv match
arose as result of a use of Microsoft Co Pilot,” Guildford wrote in a letter to the Home Affairs Committee, after weeks of denying the use of AI.
Artificial intelligence is far from a perfect technology. It is still particularly prone to hallucinations, and that tendency can fuel the spread of misinformation with real-life consequences, and the West Midlands intelligence report incident is far from the first example. Back in October, major consulting firm Deloitte had to pay the Australian government a partial refund after delivering them a $290,000 AI-generated report riddled with fake academic research papers and court judgments.
But despite the shortcomings of AI, American big tech companies have been engaged in a full-blown effort to deploy the technology far and wide, across all parts of the workforce.
“America needs to be the most aggressive in adopting AI technology of any country in the world, bar none, and that is an imperative,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at a press and industry briefing in October. “We have to encourage every single company, every single student, to use AI.”
Huang has also recently gone on to say that talking about the risks of AI deployment was “hurtful” and “not helpful to society.”
Microsoft is also aggressive about the future of AI in the workforce. The company made AI use mandatory for its employees and markets Copilot as an AI assistant to boost productivity in the workplace. The Copilot technology is widely deployed by a range of companies across the American corporate world. As of late last year, Copilot is also used by the U.S. House of Representatives.
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