Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries have been causing a stir for unintentionally creating fake news, as especially highlighted by the BBC. Apple is planning a tweaked UI, but here’s why that doesn’t go far enough, and what the real fix could be.
BBC highlights AI’s failures with notification summaries
BBC News has raised serious concerns not once, but twice about Apple Intelligence botching news summaries and delivering fake news as a result.
Examples have included claims that:
- a man had committed suicide, despite still being alive
- an athlete won a competition that hadn’t even happened yet
- another athlete had come out as gay, which was also false
Apple has promised to ship a software update that will “further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization.” Essentially, a UI change is coming, and Apple will continue making ongoing backend revisions to the beta feature.
If you’ve used Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries, you’ve probably seen some misinformation too.
In most cases, it’s not as big a deal if an iMessage or email is summarized incorrectly. If you’re like me, you’ll probably read the original message anyways.
With news headlines, for many of us, reading more than just the notification often doesn’t happen.
That’s why I think Apple should exclude news apps from AI summaries by default.
The key fix needed for Apple Intelligence summaries
Recently, Jason Snell at Six Colors outlined his own proposed fixes for this AI problem. I agree with Snell that Apple’s UI fix doesn’t go far enough. And hey, maybe the company’s confident it can solve this problem with its continuous invisible improvements.
But there’s a more effective fix, at least for the short-term.
Apple should disable summaries for news apps.
Users can turn them back on if they’d like, but for news apps only, the feature should have a special opt-in requirement.
Why? Because of the fact that many people only read headlines, not full articles.
But also because—very importantly—headlines are already summaries.
News editors have already carefully chosen the words they want to use in a headline to summarize an article’s contents.
Apple doesn’t need to mess with that by generating its own separate ‘summary of the summary.’
In BBC News’ examples, the problematic summaries were the result of Apple Intelligence summarizing a stack of different news notifications. Each individual notification kept its original contents, but the users saw the summarized stack.
This is a useful feature, I’ll admit. It combines several news blurbs into a single alert so you can get a quick update on what’s happened.
Top comment by mcOreos
Or, we develop a society with common sense. Where an individual can realize the mistake and carry on with their day. Without making it their personality to freak out at whatever headline they see and not bother actually reading into something.
That, or just stop this “AI” hype. Apple is only doing it because the rest of industry has had such a love fest with LLMs. It’s the HD of the 2000s where everywhere you looked something had “High Definition”!!!.
But losing this summarized stack is a small inconvenience to suffer in exchange for ensuring news alerts remain accurate.
Apple Intelligence fake news: Wrap-up
So far, Apple has avoided any real controversy with its image generation features in iOS 18.2. That’s a big accomplishment that many of its competitors couldn’t achieve. But AI news summaries are starting to provide a similar headache.
In 6 months or a year, when Apple has gotten its AI models up to snuff and out of beta, maybe news app summaries can come back by default. For now though, one key change would make this problem go away. And I suspect you won’t find many users who miss it—especially if the opt-in option remains.
How do you think Apple should fix its AI summaries problem? Let us know in the comments.
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