Apple has now suspended its artificial intelligence news feature after making errors in attempting to summarize headlines.
The feature created to reshare news stories from other sources began sending out inaccurate headlines to its users.
The inaccuracies led to the National Union of Journalists and newsrooms like the BBC alerting Apple about these concerning errors, which caused their stories to be reshared with inaccurate information.
According to Apple, the feature summarizes notifications to save Apple users time reading full-length stories.
One concerning example shared by Sky News was a headline which originally read “Gisele Pelicot says she went to court ‘for my children and grandchildren’” which was summarised to read that she was “defending her convictions.”
The BBC also filed a complaint with Apple after the feature sent out notifications with the BBC logo which claimed that Luigi Mangione had shot himself.
The National Union of Journalists recommended that the service be removed to “ensure it plays no role in contributing to the misinformation already prevalent and causing harm to journalism online”.
NUJ calls on Apple to remove Apple Intelligence, warning of harm to journalism.
— NUJ (@NUJofficial) January 7, 2025
Laura Davison, NUJ general secretary "The public must not be placed in a position of second-guessing the accuracy of news they receive."https://t.co/HSx21wlZDM
The news summaries were an attempt by Apple to include more Artificial Intelligence in their software, however, they have now made a statement that the feature will no longer be in use, adding that they are” working on improvements and will make them available in a future software update.”