Apple has said it will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that generates inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones.
The company, in its first acknowledgment of the concern, said on Monday that it is working on a software change to “further clarify” when notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.
The tech giant is facing calls to withdraw the technology after it was misrepresented.
The BBC he complained last month after an AI-generated headline summary falsely told some readers that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself.
On Friday, Apple's artificial intelligence inaccurately summarized notifications from the BBC app to claim that Luke Littler had won the PDC World Darts Championship hours before it started – and that Spanish tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.
It's the first time Apple has officially responded to concerns raised by the BBC about bugs that appear to be coming from the organization's app.
“These summaries from Apple spread misinformation that does not reflect – and in some cases completely contradicts – the original BBC content,” the BBC said on Monday.
“They damage trust not just in the BBC but in news and information more widely. It is imperative that Apple address these issues as a matter of urgency.”
Apple said its update will arrive “in the coming weeks.”
There is said earlier its notification summaries – which group together and rewrite previews of multiple recent app notifications into a single alert on a user's lock screens – aim to let users “scan for key details”.
“Apple Intelligence features are in beta, and we're constantly making improvements using user feedback,” the company said in a statement Monday, adding that receiving summaries is optional.
“A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text displayed is a summary provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report concerns if they see an unexpected notification summary.”
the function, along with others released as part of the broader suite of AI tools was released in the UK in December. It's only available on its iPhone 16 models, iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max phones running iOS 18.1 and later, and some iPads and Macs.
Several examples of the technology appearing to interpret messages in an extremely crude, literal way have gone viral on social media.
In November, a journalist from ProPublica emphasized Apple AI's erroneous summaries of signals from the New York Times app, which it assumed had reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.
The BBC was unable to independently verify the screenshots, and the New York Times declined to comment.
Reporters Without Borders, an organization representing the rights and interests of journalists, called on Apple to disable the feature in December.
It said attributing a false headline to Mr Mangione on the BBC showed that “generative AI services are still too immature to provide reliable information to the public”.
Apple isn't alone in releasing generative AI tools that can create text, images and more content when prompted by users — but with mixed results.
Google's AI review feature, which provides a written summary of information from search results at the top of the search engine in response to user queries, came under fire last year to get some random answers.
At the time, a Google spokesperson said these were “isolated examples” and that the feature generally worked well.