Apple Intelligence’s summary of the false alerts that got Apple in trouble.
Photo: BBC News
Apple recently came under pressure to remove its AI news roundups after several reports of false headlines. The company won’t do that, but it will tweak how the feature works.
Apple updates to highlight notification summaries generated using Apple Intelligence.
Notification Summary Launches in iOS 18.2
One of the key features of Apple Intelligence is using AI to summarize unread notifications. The feature was released in beta on December 11 as part of iOS 18.2. In theory, this would allow you to review both important and unread notifications at a glance. However, the system is not perfect.
In late December 2024, Apple Intelligence created the following misleading headline: BBC News Murder suspect Luigi Mangione claims he shot himself. However, this was not true, and it caused a huge uproar among the media community. They strongly criticized Apple and requested that the feature be removed completely.
Recently, an AI summary was created as a notification summary claiming that Luke Littler had won the PDFC World Darts Championship despite the competition not having started yet. There have been several reports of notification summaries generating misleading headlines.
Apple’s fix doesn’t reduce misleading headlines and errors.
Apple has now released a statement: BBC About this. Alert summaries generated using Apple Intelligence have been updated to be “more clear,” indicating that they may not always be accurate. This change will take effect in the coming weeks.
The following is the company’s full statement.
Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we’re constantly improving them based on user feedback. A software update in the coming weeks will make it clearer whether the text you see is a summary provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report concerns if they see an unexpected notification summary.
Modifying Apple Intelligence to produce more accurate summaries is not straightforward. The LLM model creates a summary that Apple continually improves through training. So there is no “fix” here. The model improves over time, increasing the accuracy of the generated alert summaries.
If you feel that notification digests are causing problems due to incorrect headlines, you may want to consider turning off notification digests completely.
