Apple AI fake news alerts highlight tech’s disinformation problem

The artificial intelligence feature on iPhones has raised concerns about the technology’s ability to spread misinformation, prompting warnings about fake news.

A feature that was recently launched last week apple which aggregates users’ notifications using artificial intelligence, pushed wrongly aggregated BBC News app notifications for 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 happened a day before the finals of the actual tournament, which Littler won.

Then, a few hours after that incident, a separate notice generated by Apple Intelligence, the tech giant’s artificial intelligence system, claimed that tennis legend Rafael Nadal was gay.

The BBC has been trying to get Apple to fix the problem for about a month. British public television complained to Apple in December after creating a false caption indicating that his AI feature was Luigi Mangione the person who committed the murder was arrested In New York, Brian Thompson, the CEO of the health insurance firm UnitedHealthcare, shot himself – which never happened.

Apple was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. On Monday, Apple told the BBC that it was working on an update to fix the problem by adding clarity on when Apple Intelligence was responsible for the text displayed in the notifications. Currently generated news alerts appear to come directly from the source.

“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we’re constantly 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 isn’t the only news organization affected by Apple Intelligence, which inaccurately summarizes news alerts. In November, the feature sent a generalized notification with artificial intelligence It is wrong to claim that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been arrested.

The error was noted on the Bluesky social media program by Ken Schwenke, editor-in-chief of investigative journalism website ProPublica.

CNBC reached out to the BBC and The New York Times to comment on Apple’s AI feature’s proposed solution to the disinformation problem.

Apple shows itself AI-generated notification summaries as an effective way to group and rewrite news app notification previews on users’ lock screen.

This is an Apple feature he says designed to help users scan their notifications for key details and reduce the huge hurdle of updates that many smartphone users are familiar with.

However, this resulted in what AI experts call “hallucinations” – AI-generated responses that contain false or misleading information.

“I suspect that Apple won’t be alone in facing challenges with AI-generated content. We’ve already seen numerous examples of AI services confidently reporting fallacies called ‘hallucinations,'” Ben Wood, senior technology market analyst at research firm CCS Insights, told CNBC. said.

In Apple’s case, as the AI ​​tried to combine notifications and condense them to show only a basic summary of the information, it combined words in a way that inaccurately characterized events but confidently presented them as facts.

“Apple had the added complexity of compressing content into very short summaries, which resulted in the delivery of the wrong messages,” Wood said. “Apple will certainly try to resolve this issue as soon as possible, and I’m sure competitors will be watching closely to see how it responds.”

Generative AI tries to find the best possible answer to a question or query entered by a user, based on large amounts of data on which the underlying large language models are trained.

Sometimes the AI ​​doesn’t know the answer. But since it is programmed to always provide a response to user requests, this can result in situations where the AI ​​is effectively embedded.

It’s unclear exactly when Apple’s fix for the notification aggregation bug will be fixed. The iPhone maker said it expects one to arrive “in the coming weeks.”