iPhone AI news alerts interrupted after errors

Apple has suspended a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has drawn criticism and complaints for making repeated errors in its summaries of news headlines.

The tech giant was facing growing pressure to remove the service, which sent notifications that appeared to come from news agency apps.

“We are working on improvements and will make them available in a future software update,” an Apple spokesperson said.

The BBC was among the groups to complain, after an alert generated by Apple’s AI falsely told to some readers that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had committed suicide.

The report also inaccurately summarized the headlines of News from the sky, the New York Times and the Washington Post, according to reports from journalists and others on social media.

The media and press groups had pushed the company to withdraw, warning that the feature was not ready and that AI-generated errors were adding to problems with misinformation and loss of trust in information.

The BBC complained to Apple in December, but it only responded in January when it promised a software update that would clarify the role of AI in creating the summaries, which were optional and available only to readers with the latest iPhones.

This prompted a new wave of criticism that the tech giant wasn’t going far enough.

Apple has now decided to disable this feature entirely for news and entertainment apps.

“With the latest software beta releases 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 said.

The company said that for other apps, AI-generated app alert summaries will appear in italics.

“We are pleased that Apple has listened to our concerns and is suspending the news summary feature,” a BBC spokesperson said.

“We look forward to working constructively with them on next steps. Our priority is the accuracy of the information we communicate to the public, which is essential to building and maintaining trust.”

Apple had said the feature, rolled out to users in the UK in December, was aimed at making customers’ lives more efficient.

It consolidates and rewrites previews of multiple recent app notifications into a single alert on users’ lock screens.

The move comes as the company faces pressure to show off its AI developments, which investors hoped would spark a new wave of demand for iPhones and other technologies.

The company’s shares fell more than 4% on Thursday after sales struggled in China.

Apple is generally robust about its products and often doesn’t even respond to reviews.

This simple statement from the tech giant speaks volumes about the damage caused by its high-profile new AI feature.

Not only was it inadvertently spreading misinformation by generating inaccurate news summaries, but it was also damaging the reputation of news organizations like the BBC, whose lifeblood is their reliability, by displaying false headlines alongside of their logos.

That’s not great for a newly launched service.

AI developers have always said that technology has a tendency to “hallucinate” (invent things) and AI chatbots all carry warnings that the information they provide should be double-checked.

But AI-generated content is increasingly being emphasized, particularly by providing summaries. at the top of search engines – and that in itself implies that it is reliable.

Even Apple, with all the financial and expert power it has to develop this technology, has proven very publicly that this is not yet the case.

It’s also worth noting that the last mistake, which preceded Apple’s change of plan, was an AI summary of content from the Washington Post, as reported by their technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler.

The media belongs to someone that Apple boss Tim Cook knows well: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.