After a series of fake headlines and a nasty backlash from journalists and news outlets, Apple has halted its AI-powered news summary notifications…for now.
“With the release of the latest beta software for iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, notification summaries for the News & Entertainment section will be temporarily unavailable,” an Apple spokesperson told Mashable via email.
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The Apple Intelligence feature, introduced in 2024, actually debuted with the release of iOS 18.2, and was launched in the UK on Dec. 11, was supposed to summarize the headlines with brief warnings. These are delivered to Apple devices running iOS 18.1 and later including the latest iPhone 16 and 16 Plus.
In December, BBC News accused Apple’s AI of sending a false alert that said a newspaper reported that Luigi Mangione, who was arrested for killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had died by suicide. It wasn’t the only fake BBC News article summary for Apple, and it wasn’t the only publisher represented by inaccurate Apple AI-generated news articles.
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Apple reportedly didn’t respond to the BBC’s complaint until January, when, as the news outlet reported, the company “said it was working to determine whether the snapshots were made with AI.”
In January, the National Union of Journalists and the journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders publicly urged Apple to remove the AI ​​productivity feature, the organization criticized “the inability of AI systems to publish high-quality information, even if it is based on journalistic sources.”
On Thursday, an Apple spokesperson told the BBC that the company is “working on improvements and will make them available in future software updates.”
As MacRumors points out, Apple has updated the Notification Summaries feature in the Settings app with a warning, learning that the feature “may contain bugs”. Also, Notification Summaries outside of the News & Entertainment section will still appear, but in italics for now.
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