Apple has killed its Apple Intelligence AI news feature after it fabricated stories and twisted real headlines into fiction.
Apple’s AI news was alleged to make life easier by summing up news alerts from multiple sources. Instead, it created chaos by pushing out fake news, often under trusted media brands.
Here’s where all of it went mistaken:
- Using the BBC’s logo, it invented a story claiming tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay, completely misunderstanding a story a few Brazilian player.
- It jumped the gun by announcing teenage darts player Luke Littler had won the PDC World Championship – before he’d even played in the ultimate.
- In a more serious blunder, it created a fake BBC alert claiming Luigi Mangione, who’s accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had killed himself.
- The system stamped The New York Times’ name on a completely made-up story about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being arrested.
An AI-generated news summary of a BBC article wrongly stated CEO shooting suspect Luigi Mangione shot himself. The BBC’s logo was attached.
The BBC, angered over seeing its name attached to fake stories, eventually filed a proper criticism. Press groups joined in, similar to Reporters Without Borders, who warned that letting AI rewrite the news puts the general public’s right to accurate information in danger.
The National Union of Journalists also called for the feature to be removed, saying readers shouldn’t must guess whether what they’re reading is real.
Research has previously shown that even when people learn that AI-created media is fake, it still leaves a psychological ‘mark’ that persists afterwards.
Apple Intelligence – which offered a spread of AI-powered features including AI news – was one among the headline features of the brand new iPhone 16 range.
Apple is an organization that prides itself on polished products that ‘just work’ – it’s rare for Apple to backtrack – in order that they evidently had little alternative here.
That said, they’re not alone so far as AI blunders go. Not way back, Google’s AI-generated search summaries told people they might eat rocks and put glue on pizza.
Apple plans to resurrect the feature with warning labels and special formatting to indicate when AI creates the summaries.
Should readers must decode different fonts and labels simply to know in the event that they’re reading real news? And here’s a radical idea – they might just keep displaying the news headline itself?
It all goes to indicate that, as AI continues to seep into every corner of our digital lives, some things – like receiving accurate news facts – are just too vital to get mistaken.
An enormous U-turn from Apple, but probably not the last we’ll see of its type.
