Apple AI fake news alerts highlight the tech’s misinformation problem

An artificial intelligence feature on the iPhone generates fake news, raising concerns about the technology’s ability to spread misinformation.

Last week, a feature recently launched by Apple which summarizes user notifications with AI, pushed BBC News app notifications inaccurately summarizing the broadcaster’s story about the PDC World Darts Championship semi-final, falsely stating that the darts player British Luke Littler had won the championship.

The incident happened a day before the finals of the actual tournament, which Littler won.

Then, a few hours after that incident, a separate notification generated by Apple Intelligence, the tech giant’s AI system, falsely claimed that tennis legend Rafael Nadal had become gay.

The BBC has been trying for about a month to get Apple to fix the problem. The British state broadcaster complained to Apple in December after its AI feature generated a false headline suggesting that Luigi Mangione, the man arrested after the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare in New York, shot himself – which never happened.

Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. On Monday, Apple told the BBC that it is working on an update to fix the problem by adding a clarification that shows when Apple Intelligence is responsible for the text displayed in notifications. Currently, generated news notifications appear as if they come directly from the source.

“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we’re continually making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement shared with the BBC. Apple added that they encourage users to report a concern if they see an “unexpected notification summary.”

The BBC is not the only news organization to have been affected by Apple Intelligence inaccurately summarizing news notifications. In November, the function sent an AI summary notification falsely claiming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.

The error was reported on social media app Bluesky by Ken Schwencke, senior editor at investigative journalism site ProPublica.

CNBC contacted the BBC and the New York Times to comment on Apple’s proposed solution to the disinformation problem of its AI function.

Apple sells its AI-generated notification summaries as an effective way to group and rewrite news app notification previews into a single alert on the user’s lock screen.

It’s an Apple feature he says is designed to help users scan their notifications for key details and reduce the huge barrage of updates that many smartphone users are familiar with.

However, this has resulted in what AI experts call “hallucinations” – AI-generated responses that contain false or misleading information.

“I suspect that Apple will not be the only one to have challenges with the content generated by AI. We have already seen numerous examples of AI services relying on mistruths, so called “hallucinations”, “Ben Wood, chief analyst of the tech-focused market. research firm CCS Insights, told CNBC.

In the case of Apple, because the AI ​​tries to consolidate the notifications and condense them to show only a basic summary of the information, it has mashed the words together in a way that is inaccurately characterized the events – but with confidence they present as facts.

“Apple had the added complexity of trying to compress content into very short summaries, which ended up conveying the wrong messages,” Wood added. “Apple will no doubt be looking to address this as soon as possible, and I’m sure rivals will be watching closely to see how they respond.”

Generative AI works by trying to figure out the best possible answer to a question or prompt entered by a user, relying on a large amount of data whose large underlying language models are formed.

Sometimes the AI ​​might not know the answer. But because it has been programmed to always present a response to the user’s command, this can result in cases where the AI ​​is found effectively.

It’s not clear exactly when Apple’s resolution to the bug in its notification summary feature will be fixed. The iPhone maker said it expects one to arrive in “the coming weeks.”