Apple AI Fake News Alerts Highlight Tech’s Misinformation Problem

An artificial intelligence feature on iPhones is generating fake news alerts, raising concerns about the technology’s ability to spread misinformation.

Last week, a newly launched feature by Apple that summarizes user notifications using AI removed inaccurately summarized BBC News app notifications about the broadcaster’s story on the PDC World Darts Championship semi-final , falsely claiming that British darts player Luke Littler had won the championship. .

The incident occurred one day before the tournament final, which Littler won.

Then, just hours after that incident occurred, a separate notification generated by Apple Intelligence, the tech giant’s artificial intelligence system, falsely claimed 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. The British state broadcaster complained to Apple in December after its artificial intelligence feature generated a false headline suggesting that Luigi Mangione, the man arrested after murder Brian Thompson, CEO of health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare in New York, had 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 resolve the issue by adding a clarification showing when Apple Intelligence is responsible for the text displayed in notifications. Currently, generated news notifications appear as coming directly from the source.

“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continually making 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 a concern if they see an “unexpected notification summary.”

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

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

CNBC has contacted the BBC and the New York Times for comment on Apple’s proposed solution to its AI feature’s misinformation problem.

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

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

However, this has led to what AI experts call “hallucinations”: AI-generated responses that contain false or misleading information.

“I suspect Apple won’t be the only one that will have challenges with AI-generated content. We’ve already seen numerous examples of AI services reliably telling falsehoods, so-called ‘hallucinations,'” said Ben Wood, chief market analyst focused on the technology. research firm CCS Insights told CNBC.

In Apple’s case, because the AI ​​is trying to consolidate notifications and condense them to show only a basic summary of information, it has mixed up the words in a way that inaccurately characterizes the events, but confidently presents them as facts. .

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

Generative AI works by trying to find the best possible answer to a question or message inserted by a user, based on large amounts of data on which its large underlying language models are trained.

Sometimes the AI ​​may not know the answer. But because it has been programmed to always present a response to the user’s prompts, this can result in cases where the AI ​​actually lies.

It’s unclear 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.”