Apple Intelligence is producing wildly inaccurate news summaries, BBC is fuming

The BBC has issued a complaint to Apple after an AI summary of a news headline gave a completely false impression of the story.

As part of the nascent roll out of generative AI Apple Intelligence features, the Phone maker is summarising multiple notifications from the singular apps, making multiple alerts much easier to digest.

That can be a useful tool if you subscribe to breaking news alerts from your favourite sources, for instance. However, only if it works correctly. Earlier this week a summary of BBC News alerts declared “Luigi Mangione shoots himself.”

Mangione is the suspect charged with the fatal shooting of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York earlier this month. Mangione did not shoot himself, did not attempt to, and is currently in custody with police in the United States.

So it’s not clear how Apple Intelligence, within a summary that contained otherwise accurate information from other stories, managed to distort this alert so much.

The BBC is not happy though, and with good reason: “BBC News is the most trusted news media in the world,” a spokesperson told BBC News. “It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name and that includes notifications.”

The BBC said it has contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”.

Apple hasn’t commented on the report.

Worryingly, this is not an anomaly. The New York Times also suffered a similar fate last month when a summary incorrectly declared: “Netanyahu arrested”. The story was about an arrest warrant being issued for the Israeli PM.

And, on a lighter note, when the feature was in beta a poor fella learned he’d been dumped in pretty cold terms by a Messages notification summary.

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