Cop cops it after Copilot cops out: West Midlands Police chief quits over AI hallucination The chief constable of West Midlands Police has retired after his force used fictional output from Microsoft Copilot in deciding to ban Israeli fans from attending a football match at Birmingham club Aston Villa. Chief Constable Craig Guildford, 52, retired from England's third-largest police force on 16 January. He was due to …
We’re all hearing increasingly bonkers stories involving LLMs but this one is definitely up there with the barrister/solicitor/whatever that cited a fictitious case in his court filing.
I would like to think that this will mean the police and judiciary would impose a total ban on using this shit but I know that won’t happen because it would require a minuscule amount of effort
Given that Microsoft is almost universal on work desktops and that Microsoft are pushing Copilot into all aspects of it as hard as possible it might require a good deal more than a miniscule amount of effort to keep it from being used. Perhaps double up staff with a monitor peering over every user's shoulder to ensure they don't use it, even accidentally.
The claim that AI hallucinated the fictional "intelligence" about Israeli football fans is very likely a complete lie, like all the rest of the evidence that Guildford gave to the Home Affairs Committee.
The more verisimilar explanation is simply that the police fabricated it themselves, and, being so obviously profoundly intellectually challenged, they assumed that nobody would ever check their claims.
Fair enough, but I prefer Occam's razor.
The police are lying.
Given that we already know they were lying.
Vs
The police managed to get AI to hallucinate the exact false information they were looking for.
"AI hallucinated these claims" is the new "someone hacked my social media account".
Sorry, guess again.
Never been arrested, no speeding conviction, never even got points.
What I have experienced is three separate cases of child abuse and sexual assault where the police went out of their way to protect the perpetrator, two of whom were Muslim, the third was the spouse of a police officer.
You don't have to have a criminal record to recognise the corruption, incompetence and criminality across every police force, from top to bottom.
Look, there has been plenty of actual evidence that various UK police forces have, on various occasions, demonstrated troubling levels of corruption, racism and incompetence. That is beyond dispute.
However, this case does look very much like pure incompetence/stupidity.
It is depressingly plausible that some (presumably quite senior) plod(s), with frightening levels of ignorance about things digital, managed to prompt an AI with something involving football hooliganism and Maccabi fans in the UK, and was rewarded with some confabulated bollocks in the form of a non-existent match. One version doing the rounds is that they Googled it, and Google served up a Gemini result at the top of the list, which they didn't even realise was AI. The most risible thing here is that, AI or not, they did not bother to check the result. So, incompetence – tick; stupidity – tick.
What you seem to be suggesting, is that, rather, they wanted to ban the Maccabi fans (plausible; they may even have had good non-political reasons to want to do so – see below), and thus themselves invented a match which never happened as a justification, under the assumption that no-one would bother to check. And then blamed AI retrospectively.
Those last two parts go beyond stupidity to completely insane. If assuming they could get away with inventing a match were not dumbass enough, trying to justify it with an excuse which could only possibly make them look even more ridiculous is literally beyond belief. Conspiracy theories generally assume some cunning on the part of the conspirators. Your alleged conspiracy most definitely does not!
I know which explanation I prefer.
The irony in all this, as others have pointed out, is that Maccabi fans do have a well-known track record as absolute thugs. There is an argument that the West Midlands police actually arrived at a sensible, if politically-[in]sensitive decision, albeit through a hilarity of jaw-dropping fuckwittage.
Sorry, but I don't buy your argument that any of it it is implausible.
We already know that they lied about the "intelligence reports" they got from Dutch police about violence from Maccabi fans.
They really were stupid enough to believe that no one would bother checking back with the Dutch police.
Given that we know they lied about that, it is not at all implausible that they invented some more claims about a non-existent football match and would again believe that no one would bother to check.
Then, having been caught in that lie, rather than admit they simply made it all up, which would definitely have got them fired, they first tried to blame it on Google search, and then on AI.
This would be the obvious next step for someone caught in a lie, given all the recent stories about, for example, the Sandie Peggie case.
I do believe both that there was a conspiracy by senior police officers to prevent an Israeli football team playing in Birmingham - which was not motivated by fear of violence by Israelis - and that those police officers have the cunning and intelligence of a potato. Not only is this entirely plausible, it is the most parsimonious explanation.
Edited: OOps, already mentioned by retiredFool's post.
It's become so common there's even a site that tracks it, AI Hallucination Cases which, at time of this post, stands at 811 instances.
Except that trusting an employee involves trusting the employee's response to an entire millieu of incentives that do not apply to these computer programs for the simple reason that they cannot.
Certainly, there was a failure to dig deeper. But the lack of agency for the computer program is a major issue here.
> Imagine if you or I had pulled this stunt ?
> He should have been sacked with extreme prejudice.
I found it ironic, but unsurprising, that Labour MPs demanded he be sacked for lying to parliament but don't seem to be so keen on an enquiry into former Labour leader Tony Blair's lying to parliament and fabricated "weapons of mass destruction" reports which he used to justify going to war in Iraq.
This is only part of it. He'd retired earlier and been rehired. This seems to have been due to some quirk of the pension scheme that would have made it disadvantageous to keep working but "retirement" sealed that off and he could then have been rehired without disadvantage to himself.
He seems to have had a good record in turning the force's effectiveness round but also had complaints about bullying upheld against him. Things are seldom black and white.
It wasn't the WMP who decided that Maccabi fans couldn't attend, but it was their report.
There is a separate Safety Advisory Group involving the Council, Police and other partners who made the decision, which of course was influenced by the WMP report, which also apparently included false accusations from a Maccabi away game in The Netherlands.
The moral crumple zone - where human operators absorb moral and legal responsibility when (AI) systems fail.
The pattern is not new, but those type of cases will explode in number I persume, as more of the "agents" and slop "halucinated" shite will muddy the waters.
What a time to be a scapegoat!
But who actually invoked Copilot to trigger the whole mess? Have they been prevented from doing it again? Are procedures for verifying now proof against a repetition?
Or do we have proof that it was Guildford who literally sat at the keyboard instead of doing his job and having subordinates gathering data?
We don't have any proof that Copilot, or any other AI, was involved at all.
Only the word of two police officers who have been proven to already have lied to a parliamentary committee, and also claim to have lost the minutes of a meeting where Dutch police informed them of rioting by Israeli football fans.
Much more likely is that they simply fabricated the information themselves.
"AI hallucinated these false claims" is the new "someone hacked my social media account".
Your thinking is broken. And boring.
If the lack of proof you assert were equivalent t9 it not having happened, as you suggest, then he would not have misinformed MPs that it had not happened, and therefore not have lost Ministers etc confidence, and therefore not have needed to resign.
"Or do we have proof that it was Guildford who literally sat at the keyboard instead of doing his job and having subordinates gathering data?"
I don't think anyone believes that to have been the case. His problem was in not ensuring what he said was correct and accepting the blame for that. It's been sadly lacking in public life. I can think of at least one other instance where much more drastic failure didn't lead to resignation; even to eventual promotion.
So let me get this straight.
The cops fucked up big time. Lied about it, and then instead of facing the music, the head copper retired with full pay and benefits at FIFTY TWO?
Must be nice to never have to find out when you've fucked around and lied about it. Typical cops.
How long is it going to be before AI kills someone and the cops just shrug and say "yeah, whatever. Shit happens?"
There are strange things around pensions in the higher paid levels of public service. It seems some doctors can be better off retiring early rather than working on. The Treasury and HMRC are responsible for that.
It also works out better, or at least used to, for a police officer to retire rather that die in service. One of our SOCOs died of cancer; they just managed to get the paper work done in time to retire him as it would have been better for the widow's pension. I'm not sure what the outcomes were for the widows of one of our other ex-SOCOs who was murdered, the other murdered officer I knew and all those I didn't know but some of whose cases I worked on.
I don't think AI was involved in the death of Charles de Menezes.
Until you retire, you are contributing to your eventual pension.
Pension is deferred income.
People who say things like "higher paid levels of public service" resent pensions they regard as excessive.
So once the pension pot reaches a maximum amount (per year etc etc) if you carry on working you'll be paying to do so. I don't mean not being paid, I mean paying.
I liked my job as much as most people, but I have different hobbies.
So you retire, briefly.
Then you come back if you are useful and want to, on a different contract not pensionable.
Typically, it is an age when slowing down is wise or essential, so it seems to work.
I have no confidence in Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood or any of her Cabinet colleagues.
A reputable Chief Constable was hounded for a mistake any non-technical person could have made. Anyway, he may have had overall accurate intelligence about the behaviour of Israeli football fans.
> So what else was it based on then?
There were incidents with the Maccabi fans in Amsterdam beforehand. The WMP were briefed by the Dutch police on those incidents and the situation in general that occurred.
The WMP exaggerated, mis-quoted, left out relevant details, and attributed statments to the Dutch Police that the Dutch Police deny making, in a report they prepared for the Safety Advisory Group, which also contained the outright fabricated AI-hallucinated West Ham match that didn't happen.
So there was much fuckupery and enough incompetence within WMP to, IMO, lead to the sacking of several staff within the WMP involved in making that report.
There is much media reporting around this incident covering what I said above, go and read multiple articles on the matter, not just this one. Different publications will have different takes depending on what that publicatoin thinks is significant or relevent. The Reg, for example, being mostly a tech-rag, is most interested in the AI aspect, whereas a more general publication (BBC, Guardian, whatnot) may be more interested in other elements, such as WMP twisting the Dutch Police's reports.
Whenever you use AI, get it to cite its sources. Then check that those sources exist and are relevant. When I played with Copilot I discovered that it often couldn’t accurately remember the prompt let alone provide evidence for its suppositions. Copilot is the AI equivalent of Donald Trump. Not very clever, not evidenced, useless - and inexplicably popular.
