Apple pulls AI news summaries after blatantly false headlines
Following a series of blatantly false summaries of headlines and severe backlash from journalists and newsrooms, Apple has paused its AI-generated news summary push notifications...for now.
"With the latest beta software releases of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Notification summaries for the News & Entertainment category will be temporarily unavailable," an Apple spokesperson told Mashable via email.
The Apple Intelligence feature, which was introduced in 2024, really kicked off with the release of iOS 18.2, and launched in the UK on Dec. 11, was supposed to sum up news headlines in short push alerts. These are delivered to Apple devices compatible with iOS 18.1 and later including the latest iPhone 16 and 16 Plus.
In December, BBC News accused Apple's AI of sending a false push notification attributed to the news outlet reporting that Luigi Mangione, arrested for the murder of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, had died by suicide. It was not Apple's only false BBC News headline summary, nor was it the only publisher represented by inaccurate Apple AI-generated news outlines.
Apple reportedly didn't respond to the BBC's complaint until January, when, as the news outlet reported, the company "said it was working to clarify that summaries were AI-generated."
In January, the National Union of Journalists and journalism body Reporters Without Borders publicly urged Apple to remove the generative AI feature, the latter criticising "the inability of AI systems to systematically publish quality information, even when it is based on journalistic sources."
On Thursday, an Apple spokesperson told the BBC the company was "working on improvements and will make them available in a future software update."
As MacRumors points out, Apple has updated the Notification Summaries feature in the Settings app with a warning, reading that the feature "may contain errors". Also, Notification Summaries that fall outside the News and Entertainment category will still appear, but in italics for now.