They Obviously Do Use "The AI"

This morning I read this article about the West Midlands Police Chief Constable, Craig Guildford, who "has admitted misleading MPs by citing a fictitious football match, generated by Microsoft Copilot in an intelligence report justifying a fan ban." Yes, you read that right, a police chief constable presented a report, to the Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee justifying why Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were not allowed to attend the Europe League match agains Aston Villa, based on their use of Microsoft Copilot wrongly mentioning a game between West Ham Untied and Maccabi that didn't happen. What hasn't helped the Chief Constable was that in a meeting with the committee, on January 6th, he was directly asked about the use of AI and an he responded, "We don't do that. We don't use the AI." As his apology today has revealed, they obviously do use "the AI". 

The West Midlands police are not the first and certainly won't be the last to get caught out by generative AI text (aka synthetic text extruding machine). They follow in the line of a couple of Deliotte governmental reports that contained false citations from made up academic papers (a Canadian provincial government report and a report for the Australian Department of Employment). There's also an increasing number of cases involving lawyers who are getting caught out using generative AI because it has fabricated cases and quotes in their briefs. In fact, there is a crowdsourced AI hallucination database, focused on the legal profession, which is quite an eye opener. As of today (Jan 14th, 2026) there are 772 cases where lawyers (and judges!) have been caught out using generative AI - 32 of the cases in the UK.

I really think that schools need to have a good think about how they are using AI tools. Both the UK and Welsh government are heavily promoting the use of AI. Microsoft have contract with both governments and are also embedded into the Hwb national platform, with schools heavily encouraged to use Microsoft applications, including Copilot, which is increasingly featured within all MS Office tools and as a standalone 'chatbot' too. If you feel you have to use these features, double check everything that is generated. I wonder how long it will be before a school unfortunately appears in the press because of something they generated that went out to parents that contained inaccuracies?