The BBC, following up on two reports of Apple Intelligence summaries that transformed its own headlines into factually inaccurate text, got a public response from Apple:
Apple has said it will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones.
The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to “further clarify” when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.
Here’s what the BBC reports Apple’s statement is:
Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback. 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.
The statement uses the beta tag it has placed on Apple Intelligence features as a shield, while promising to add a warning label to AI-generated summaries in the future. It’s hard to accept “it’s in beta” as an excuse when the features have shipped in non-beta software releases that are heavily marketed to the public as selling points of Apple’s latest hardware. Adding a warning label also does not change the fact that Apple has released a feature that at its core consumes information and replaces it with misinformation at a troubling rate.
Apple is shipping these AI-based features rapidly, and marketing them heavily, because it fears that its competitors so far out in front that it’s a potentially existential issue. But several of these features simply aren’t up to Apple’s quality standards, and I worry that we’ve all become so inured to AI hallucinations and screw-ups that we’re willing to accept them.
We shouldn’t be. Apple’s shipping a feature that frequently rewrites headlines to be wrong. That’s a failure, and it shouldn’t be shrugged off as being the nature of OS features in the 2020s.
So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give alls apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.
Beta software contains an implicit promise that the developer will actively work to squash bugs and make the product better before it goes final. Adding a warning label in the interim is an easy band-aid, but it doesn’t address the underlying problem. Apple needs to do much more work here, and if it can’t, it needs to turn this feature off until it can release a version it can stand behind.
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