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Apple was slower than most big tech companies to embrace generative AI, but it finally got on the hype train with the release of Apple Intelligence last year. Apple’s AI system has numerous features, but many aren’t ready for release yet, and now one of the released features is going back to the drawing board. After a very public screw-up, Apple has announced it will pause its AI-powered news headline summaries.
The first batch of Apple Intelligence features arrived on devices late last year, including writing tools, call transcription, and notification summaries. That last one is the sticking point. As part of summarizing and simplifying notifications, Apple Intelligence creates summaries of notification content from news and entertainment apps. In December, Apple users were shocked to see a notification summary featuring the BBC that said Luigi Mangione, the suspected UHC assassin, had committed suicide.
The BBC complained to Apple about the mistake, but there really isn’t anyone to blame—this is just how generative AI works. The nature of this technology invites so-called hallucinations, where a model spits out incorrect information after churning through the input tokens. The BBC was not alone in having its headlines remixed incorrectly. Apple Intelligence also informed users that the New York Times had reported on the arrest of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This summary from December called attention to Apple’s notification deficiencies.
Credit: BBC / Apple
This week, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 18.3, as well as MacOS Sequoia 15.3. The company says this update will turn off notification summaries for news and entertainment apps. No one, not even Apple, can promise that a generative AI system will stop getting things wrong. However, the company says this change is only temporary. Apple is reportedly working on improvements to its notification summary feature and will re-enable it for news in the future.
According to Axios, Apple is also using the new software updates to tweak the labeling of its AI features. Users will now see text stressing that notification summaries are in beta, and therefore, could produce unexpected results.
Apple has already announced a raft of AI features coming to its devices in 2025, and some of them could get the company into similar trouble. The Siri voice assistant will get a generative AI makeover, and AI will also be used to sort notifications to show the most important ones first. Apple has yet to announce a release date for its next round of AI features.