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The iPhone's artificial intelligence feature is issuing alerts about fake news, raising concerns about the technology's ability to spread misinformation.
Last week, Apple recently rolled out a feature that summarizes users' notifications using artificial intelligence, which led to the BBC News app's inaccurately shortened notifications about the broadcaster's story about the PDC World Darts Championship semi-final, falsely claiming that British darts player Luke Littler had won the tournament . .
The incident occurred one day before the final match of the tournament, which Littler won.
Then, just hours after that incident occurred, a separate notice issued 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 for about a month to get Apple to fix the problem. British Government Radio He complained to Apple in December After its AI feature generated a false headline suggesting that Luigi Mangione, the A man was arrested after the murder Brian Thompson, CEO of health insurance company UnitedHealthcare in New York, 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 resolve the issue by adding a clarification explaining when Apple Intelligence is responsible for text displayed in notifications. Currently, generated news notifications appear to come directly from the source.
“Apple Intelligence features are in beta, and we are constantly working on 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 concerns if they see a “summary of unexpected notifications.”
The BBC isn't the only news organization affected by Apple Intelligence inaccurately summarizing news notifications. In November, the feature sent out an AI summary notification False claim of the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The bug was reported on the Bluesky social media app by Ken Schwenke, a senior editor at the investigative journalism site ProPublica.
CNBC has reached out to the BBC and the New York Times for comment on Apple's proposed solution to the problem of misinformation related to its AI feature.
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Apple promotes it AI-generated notification summaries As an effective way to aggregate news app notification previews and rewrites into a single alert on users' lock screen.
It's Apple's advantage He says It is designed to help users scan their notifications for essential details and reduce the overwhelming amount of updates that many smartphone users are familiar with.
However, this has led to what AI experts refer to as “hallucinations” – AI-generated responses that contain false or misleading information.
“I suspect Apple will not be alone in facing the challenges of AI-generated content,” said Ben Wood, a senior analyst at the technology-focused market. “We have already seen numerous examples of AI services that confidently tell lies, so-called ‘hallucinations.’” ” Research firm CCS Insights told CNBC.
In Apple's case, as the AI tries to consolidate and condense notifications to show only a basic summary of information, it imprecisely blends words together to describe events — but confidently presents them as facts.
“Apple had the added complexity of trying to compress content into very short summaries, which ultimately resulted in the wrong messages being delivered,” Wood added. He added: “Apple will undoubtedly seek to address this matter as soon as possible, and I'm sure competitors will be watching closely to see how it responds.”
Generative AI works by trying to discover the best possible answer to a question or prompt entered by a user, drawing on vast amounts of data on which underlying large language models are trained.
Sometimes the AI may not know the answer. But because it is programmed to always provide a response to user prompts, this can lead to situations where the AI actively lies.
It's not clear when Apple will fix the flaw in its notification summarization feature. The iPhone maker said it expects one to arrive in the “coming weeks.”
