UK Home Office speeds up visa and refugee processing with Copilot AI reject-a-bot

Under years of pressure from the right-wing press, the previous and current UK governments have required the Home Office to reduce immigration numbers by any means possible — whether it makes sense or not.

But visa and asylum applications keep coming. What to do about the backlog? Let’s clear it with an AI-powered black box! [Guardian]

An official can either write a detailed explanation for a decision — or they can press a button to accept the AI’s verdict. Guess which one they overwhelmingly pick? [Privacy International]

It turns out the Home Office is just running these decisions about people’s lives through Microsoft Copilot, running a version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — hallucinations and all. [Public Technology]

The Home Office scrapped a previous machine-learning visa review tool in 2020 after it was caught being insanely racist. That tool had been in place since 2015. [Guardian, 2020]