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Artificial intelligence features on iPhones are generating false news alerts, raising concerns about the technology’s ability to spread misinformation.
Last week, Apple’s recently launched feature that uses AI to aggregate user notifications posted an inaccurate aggregated notification in the BBC News app about a PDC World Darts Championship semi-final story that falsely claimed British darts player Luke Leigh Luke Littler won the championship.
The incident occurred the day before the competition’s final, which Littler ultimately won.
Then, just hours after the incident, the tech giant’s artificial intelligence system, Apple Intelligence, generated a separate notification falsely claiming that tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.
The BBC has been trying to get Apple to fix the problem for about a month. British National Broadcasting Corporation Complain to Apple in December Its artificial intelligence feature generated a false headline suggesting that Luigi Mangioni, the man arrested in connection with the murder of health insurance company UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson in New York, shot himself, but that never happened .
Apple had no immediate comment when contacted by CNBC. On Monday, Apple told the BBC that it was developing an update to address the issue and add a note showing when Apple Intelligence is responsible for the text displayed in notifications. Currently, generated news notifications appear to come directly from the source.
“The Apple Intelligence feature is in beta and we will continue to make improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement shared with the BBC. Apple added that it encourages users to report issues when viewing an “unexpected notification summary” .
The BBC isn’t the only news organization to be affected by Apple Intelligence’s inaccurate summary of news notifications. In November, the feature sent notifications for AI rollups False claim that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been arrested.
Ken Schwencke, a senior editor at the investigative journalism website ProPublica, flagged the error on the social media app Bluesky.
CNBC has contacted the BBC and The New York Times for comment on Apple’s proposed solution to the problem of error messages in its artificial intelligence features.
Artificial intelligence error message problem
This is a feature of Apple explain Designed to help users scan notifications for key details and reduce the heavy updates many smartphone users are familiar with.
However, this leads to what AI experts call “illusions” – responses produced by AI that contain false or misleading information.
“I suspect Apple won’t be the only company facing the challenge of AI-generated content. We’ve seen many examples of AI services confidently speaking false information, so-called ‘illusions,'” said Chief Analyst Tech Markets Ben Wood of research firm CCS Insights told CNBC.
In Apple’s case, as the AI attempts to consolidate notifications and condense them down to showing only basic snippets of information, it jumbles the text together in a way that inaccurately describes events but confidently presents them as fact. .
“Apple’s attempt to condense content into very brief summaries adds complexity and ultimately leads to the wrong message,” Wood added. “There’s no doubt Apple will be looking to resolve this issue as quickly as possible, and I’m sure competitors will too. Watch and see how it responds.”
Generative AI works by relying on large amounts of data trained on its underlying large language models to try to find the best answer to a user-inserted question or prompt.
Sometimes artificial intelligence may not know the answer. But because it’s programmed to always respond to user prompts, this could lead to the AI actually lying.
It’s unclear when Apple will fix the bug in the notification summary feature. The iPhone maker said it expects a product to be available “in the coming weeks.”
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