Apple Intelligence incorrectly summarized a BBC story about the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter to suggest the shooter himself had died.
Apple’s AI tools can scan notifications and serve up a quick digest on the lock screen. This can be helpful for parsing lengthy text threads, but not when it misconstrues world events. The BBC says Apple’s tool claimed that suspected shooter Luigi Mangione had shot himself despite being safe in police custody.
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“It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name, and that includes notifications,” says the BBC, which has contacted Apple to “raise this concern and fix the problem.”
The news follows a ProPublica journalist’s report that Apple’s AI tool had summarized several articles from The New York Times about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into one false headline claiming he had “been arrested,” when no such arrest had occurred.
Apple Intelligence launched in the US on eligible devices with iOS 18.1 in October; it arrived for users in the United Kingdom earlier this week with iOS 18.2.
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Competing AI tools have produced similarly misleading content. X’s AI chatbot Grok came under fire in April after falsely claiming that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi lost the election before the election had even happened. Google AI’s Summaries tool has also been criticized for producing false answers, including suggesting users add glue to their pizza to help it stick better.
After Apple previewed Apple Intelligence at WWDC this summer, CEO Tim Cook told The Washington Post that he wasn’t 100% confident the company’s AI wouldn’t hallucinate false information. “But I think we have done everything that we know to do, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology in the areas that we’re using it in,” he said.
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