After complaint from BBC, Apple opts to suspending artificial intelligence feature after inaccurate summaries of news headlines
Apple has suspended an artificial intelligence (AI) feature after a complaint that it was making inaccurate summaries of news headlines.
In December, the BBC had complained to Apple over a notification from the company’s new Apple Intelligence AI technology that had generated a number of false headlines, alongside the BBC logo.
The AI feature, which summarises notifications from mobile apps, displayed an incorrect summary stating that Luigi Mangione, the suspect arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance chief executive Brian Thompson, had shot himself.
False headlines
Another false news notification reported that Luke Littler had won the PDC World Darts Championship hours before the event took place, and a third said Spanish tennis player Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.
At the time the BBC said it had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”.
It said Apple had declined to comment.
But earlier this month Apple for the first time acknowledged the issue, and said it will ‘update’ its AI features (rather than suspend it) to clarify when notification summaries are generated automatically, after the summary feature was also found to be producing inaccurate information from the New York Times.
A summary of New York Times alerts had wrongly claiming that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had been arrested.
Apple’s AI feature essentially summarises users’ news notifications and groups them into a single alert on their lock screens. Apple is working on a version that will warn iPhone users of potential errors and will use italicised text.
Apple had faced calls to suspend the summaries, but last week said it was not planning to do so.
For example Reporters Without Borders had called on Apple to disable the feature after the headline featuring Luigi Mangione.
In the UK, the National Union of Journalists had called for the service to be removed to “ensure it plays no role in contributing to the misinformation already prevalent and causing harm to journalism online”.
AI feature suspended
But now a week later the Guardian newspaper reported that Apple is now suspending the artificial intelligence feature that made inaccurate summaries of news headlines.
Apple reportedly said in a statement that the feature would be suspended as part of its next software update, due imminently.
“Notification summaries for the news and entertainment category will be temporarily unavailable,” Apple was quoted by the Guardian as saying. “We are working on improvements and will make them available in a future software update.”
“We’re pleased that Apple has listened to our concerns and is pausing the summarisation feature for news,” a BBC spokesperson was quoted as saying. “We look forward to working with them constructively on next steps. Our priority is the accuracy of the news we deliver to audiences which is essential to building and maintaining trust.”
The news summaries are part of Apple’s drive to include more AI features in its products, under the label Apple Intelligence, which was announced back in June 2024 and arrived on iPhones later in 2024.
Apple Intelligence is available in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, but not in the EU and China.