Apple has announced that it will update, rather than discontinue, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones.
The company, in its first acknowledgment of its concerns, said Monday that it was working on a software change to “further clarify” when notifications are summaries generated by the Apple Intelligence system.
The tech giant is facing calls to remove the technology after its faulty performance.
The BBC filed a complaint last month after an AI-generated summary of its headline falsely indicated to some readers that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had committed suicide .
Apple’s AI inaccurately summed up notifications from the BBC app on Friday to claim that Luke Littler had won the PDC World Darts Championship hours before it started – and that the star Spanish tennis star Rafael Nadal came out as gay.
This is the first time Apple has officially responded to concerns raised by the BBC about the errors, which appear to come from the organization’s app.
“These Apple summaries spread misinformation that does not reflect – and in some cases completely contradict – the BBC’s original content,” the BBC said on Monday.
“They damage trust not only in the BBC, but in news and information in general. It is imperative that Apple tackles these issues urgently.”
Apple said its update would arrive “in the coming weeks.”
It has previously said that its notification summaries – which group and rewrite previews of multiple recent app notifications into a single alert on users’ lock screens – aim to allow users to “search for key details.”
“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continually making improvements using user feedback,” the company said in a statement Monday, adding that receiving the summaries was optional.
“A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text displayed is a summary provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report an issue if they see an unexpected notification summary.”
This feature, along with others released as part of its wider suite of AI tools, was rolled out in the UK in December. It’s only available on its iPhone 16, iPhone 15 Pro, and Pro Max models running iOS 18.1 and above, as well as select iPads and Macs.
Several examples of technologies appearing to interpret messages in a very direct and literal way have gone viral on social media.
In November, a ProPublica reporter pointed out erroneous summaries of Apple AI alerts from the New York Times app, suggesting that it had reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.
The BBC was unable to independently verify the screenshots and The New York Times declined to comment.
Reporters Without Borders, an organization representing the rights and interests of journalists, asked Apple to disable the feature in December.
The BBC’s false headline about Mr Mangione shows that “generative AI services are still too immature to produce reliable information for the public”.
Apple isn’t alone in deploying generative AI tools that can create text, images, and more content at users’ request, but with varying results.
Google’s AI Presentation feature, which provides a written summary of information from results at the top of its search engine in response to user queries, was criticized last year for producing erratic responses.
At the time, a Google spokesperson said these were “isolated examples” and that the feature generally worked well.
