To the surprise of no one, Apple’s new AI feature, Apple Intelligence, isn’t as smart or as informative as the company claims. Quite the opposite.
Apple is facing increasing criticism from several news organizations, most prominently the BBC, over how its AI system has falsely summarized the British broadcaster’s news stories.
For instance, last month, Apple AI falsely said the BBC reported that the murderer of the United Healthcare CEO had shot himself. Additionally, Apple AI summarized a BBC report on the winner of a world darts championship before the event had taken place and claimed that tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay. ProPublica reporter Ken Schwencke also reported significant inaccuracies in how Apple AI interpreted stories from the New York Times.
Last week, Apple responded that it would update its AI news summary feature rather than pause its alerts. “Apple Intelligence features are in beta, and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” Apple noted in a statement. “A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is a summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage people to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.”
Apple’s “clarification” would come in the form of an added warning label to AI-generated news summaries, a solution that critics argue does little to address the problem. Several news outlets, as well as both the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and Reporters Without Borders (RSF), have called on Apple to issue a more thorough apology for the flawed reports and to pause its AI news service to prevent further misinformation.
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“At a time when access to accurate reporting has never been more important, the public must not be placed in a position of second-guessing the accuracy of news they receive," Laura Davison, NUJ general secretary, said.
Of course, fixing AI summaries of news stories isn’t Apple’s only nagging news alert issue. In addition to inaccurate reports, iPhone and Apple Watch owners are also plagued by unnewsworthy “news” alerts, such as promotions for new AppleTV+ shows or other new Apple features, as well as “news” alerts for non-news feature content from other providers, including recipes, human interest stories, or celebrity profiles.
[Image credit: Techlicious/Midjourney]
Stewart Wolpin has been writing about consumer electronics for more than 35 years, including news, reviews, analysis and history, and has attended and covered nearly 50 Consumer Electronic Shows and around a dozen IFA shows in Berlin. For the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), he is an elector for and writes the official biographies of the annual CT Hall of Fame inductees, and is the keeper of the industry’s official history.
