Update coming in two weeks to help iPhone users deal with serious AI issue
Just yesterday we told you that users of iPhone models that support Apple Intelligence were still receiving notifications summarized by AI that contained fake news. The BBC first contacted Apple about this in December. Those users with an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or any of the iPhone 16 series models running iOS 18.2 or later can receive summarized notifications.
This feature summarizes the notifications received on an iPhone user's home screen to help the user "scan for key details" and decide whether or not to take a deeper dive into the notification. Over the last month, some notifications that summarized news stories were grossly incorrect. For example, one said that the man who gunned down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street, Luigi Mangione, had shot himself. Another summarized notification incorrectly stated that tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.
"Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback," the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that receiving the summaries is optional. A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary."-Apple
Earlier today Apple said that it is working on a "software change" that will make it clearer to the user when notifications are AI-generated summaries. Currently, an icon can be seen at the beginning of a summarized notification that alerts the user that the notification is a summary created by Apple Intelligence.
News notification incorrectly summarized by AI. Note icon circled in red is used by Apple to denote that this is news summarized by Apple Intelligence. |-Image credit-PhoneArena
The update won't stop fake news from arriving on your iPhone screen. As a result, you still might want to disable the feature. Yesterday, we told you how easy this is to do. Go to Settings > Notifications. Go to Summarize Notifications and toggle off the button. Apple said that the update will arrive "in the coming weeks."
Along with the BBC, an organization called Reporters Without Borders, which represents the rights and interests of journalists, asked Apple to disable the feature. The organization said back in December that the false headline about Luigi Mangione getting shot shows that "generative AI services are still too immature to produce reliable information for the public."
It might have been better had Apple been able to figure out a way to prevent false AI-generated summaries from reaching iPhone displays, but this does not seem possible at the moment. So once the update arrives in a couple of weeks, Apple says that it will make it easier for users to know when a notification they are reading is from AI and may not be real news.
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