Apple’s AI Rewrote BBC Article That Luigi Mangione Shot Himself

Apple has just started rolling out its much-loved suite of AI features to its devices, and we’re already seeing big problems. For example, i BBC complained to Apple after the AI-powered notification shortcut rewrote a BBC The headline is that the killer of UHC CEO Luigi Mangione shot himself. Mangione did not shoot himself and remains in police custody.

Apple Intelligence includes a feature in iOS that tries to free users from the fatigue of combining and summarizing notifications from individual apps. For example, if a user receives multiple text messages from the same person, instead of displaying them all in a long list, iOS will now try and condense the app’s alerts into one short notification.

It turns out—and this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with artificial intelligence—the “intelligence” in Apple Intelligence contradicts the fact that shortcuts are sometimes unfortunate or just plain wrong. Notification shortcuts were first introduced to iOS in version 18.1 released back in October; earlier this week, Apple added native integration with ChatGPT to Siri.

In the article, i BBC shared a screenshot of a notification that summarizes three different stories that were sent as push notifications. The notice reads: “Luigi Mangione shoots himself; Syrian mother hopes Assad will pay price; South Korean police raided Yoon Suk Yeol’s office.” Some abbreviations were correct, i BBC he says.

I BBC complained to Apple about the situation, which causes embarrassment to the technology company but also risks damaging the reputation of the media if readers believe they are sending false information. They have no control over how iOS decides to summarize their app alerts.

“BBC News is the most trusted news source in the world,” a BBC said the spokesperson for the matter. “It is important to us that our audience trust any information or journalism published on our behalf and that includes notices.” Apple declined to respond to BBC News questions about the snafu.

Artificial Intelligence has a lot of potential in many areas, but language models are perhaps one of the worst applications. But the company’s biggest hope is that the technology will be good enough that businesses can rely on it for use as a customer support chat or to search large collections of internal data. But it’s not there yet—in fact, businesses using AI still have to do a lot of planning for the work they produce.

It feels odd that Apple has so deeply integrated such unreliable and unpredictable technology into its products. Apple has no control over ChatGPT’s output—the OpenAI creator of the chatbot has no control over the language types, and their behavior is constantly changing. Short notification summaries should be the easiest thing for AI to do well, and Apple celebrates that too.

At least, some of the features of Apple Intelligence show how AI can have practical applications. Better image editing and a focus mode that understands which notifications to send is great. But for a company associated with a polished feel, poor notification shortcuts and tricky ChatGPT can make iOS feel unpolished. It feels like they’re riding the hype train to get new iPhone sales—an iPhone 15 Pro or newer is required to use the features.