Deny, deny, admit: UK police used Copilot AI “hallucination” when banning football fans

But Guildford admitted this week that this explanation was, in fact, bollocks. As he acknowledged in a letter on January 12, “I [recently] 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.”

He had not intended to deceive anyone, he added, saying that “up until Friday afternoon, [I] understood that the West Ham match had only been identified through the use of Google.”

This has made a bad situation even worse. Today, in the House of Commons, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood gave a long statement on the case in which she threw Guildford under the bus and backed over him five or six times.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood making a statement in Parliament today.

Mahmood blamed the ban on “confirmation bias” by the police. She said the Amsterdam stories they used were “exaggerated or simply untrue.” And she highlighted the fact that Guildford claimed “AI tools were not used to prepare intelligence reports,” but now “AI hallucination” was said to be responsible.

The whole thing was a “failure of leadership,” and Guildford “no longer has my confidence,” she said.

This last bit was something that everyone in the UK appears to agree on. Conservatives want Guildford to go, too, with party leaders calling for his resignation. MP Nick Timothy has been ranting for days on X about the issue, especially the fact that hallucination-prone AI tools are being used to produce security decisions.

“More detail on the misuse of AI by the police,” he wrote today. “They didn’t just deny it to the home affairs committee. They denied it in FOI requests. They said they have no AI policy. So officers are using a new, unreliable technology for sensitive purposes without training or rules.”