West Midlands Police earn red card over Copilot's imaginary football match

UK Parliament has delivered the official postmortem on West Midlands Police's Copilot saga, and it reads like a case study in how not to mix generative AI with public order decision-making.

MPs on the Home Affairs Committee have laid out their findings on how West Midlands Police handled the November Aston Villa fixture that saw Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters barred. The force's decision leaned in part on Copilot-generated claims about disorder at a supposed West Ham match, a fixture that existed only in the chatbot's imagination but still found its way into briefing materials.

The report lays out how that duff information managed to travel further up the chain than it ever should have. MPs say claims about the fictional West Ham game ended up shaping how risk was viewed, underlining that the real problem was not just the hallucination itself but how easily it was taken ...