Hallucinations are a part of the early genAI experience. Since the early days of ChatGPT, we have warned that AI will make mistakes and that you should always look for sources and check whether its claims are accurate. As hard as they might have tried, the big tech players were not spared.
Google’s AI Overviews in Search delivered advice on how to put glue on pizza and hallucinate other information, forcing Google to deal with the PR mess that followed and fix the AI before releasing it to a wider audience.
Apple wasn’t spared the hallucination humiliation either, with Apple Intelligence conflating News reports to deliver fake information via the summarization feature for the News app. Apple has decided to pull the feature from the latest iOS 18 beta and deploy the needed fixes.
“With the latest beta software releases of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Notification summaries for the News & Entertainment category will be temporarily unavailable,” an Apple representative told CNBC.
Apple is working on improving the News summarization feature, which will return in a future software update. It’s unclear when the feature will be back, but Apple Intelligence continues to be a top priority for Apple’s software development teams.
As a reminder, iOS 18.4 will bring another set of AI features to iPhone, iPad, and Mac, including the smarter Siri that can control some apps and access more user data on the device to provide more helpful assistance.
Apple Intelligence’s hallucination problems went viral in December when the AI summarized several BBC reports into a single notification that started with “Luigi Mangione shoots himself.” Mangione is the alleged Brian Thompson assassin who did not shoot himself.
Other hallucinations date back to November when the AI might have shown some users The New York Times summaries that claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested. That wasn’t the case.
Hallucinating news is a big problem for any AI product, whether Apple Intelligence or ChatGPT. After all, we’ve been worried about AI misleading users with fake information and the manipulation risks that might come from AI products controlled by nefarious actors. Companies like Apple must get any news-related AI features right, especially summarization. Either that or not do it at all.
In addition to disabling Notification Summaries for the News and Entertainment category in iOS 18.3 beta 3, Apple has added a label to the feature noting that summaries can contain errors, as the app is in beta.
Apple made another change to how summaries appear in notifications so you can tell them apart from regular notifications. Starting with iOS 18.3 beta 3, they’ll be italicized.
Finally, Apple Intelligence users who install the latest beta can decide whether to enable or disable summaries for an iPhone app directly from the Lock Screen. Swipe to the left on a Notification Summary to get an options menu that will let you disable them for specific apps. The alternative is going into the Settings app, where you’d have customized the AI summarizations before the new beta.
As an iPhone user in the EU, I still can’t get Apple Intelligence. I couldn’t test it or experience any of the hallucination issues that US iOS 18 beta testers have encountered. Hopefully, the hallucination problem will go away by the time I get my hands on Apple Intelligence on the iPhone.
However, it’s great to see Apple admit the errors and pull the AI summarization feature entirely rather than proceeding with it without a proper fix.
