Apple's AI news summaries are proving just as bad as Google's first foray with Overviews

Summary

• Apple's AI-generated news summaries are facing accuracy issues similar to Google's early struggles with its AI Overviews feature, prompting backlash from news outlets.
• Apple has temporarily disabled news and entertainment notification summaries in the iOS 18.3 beta and is implementing other changes to improve accuracy and transparency, including clearer beta labeling and user controls.
• Like Google before it, Apple is now working to 'fine-tune' its AI summaries after initial rollout problems.

Apple Intelligence is in its pizza-glue era, and while the Cupertino-based tech giant's AI isn't advising users to eat rocks, it has hit a similar snag with its AI-generated news summaries.

For those unaware, Google's Gemini-powered AI Overviews feature was announced at Google I/O 2024 and was released in the same month. Overviews, as we've come to familiarize ourselves with since, are concise summaries of search results highlighted in an information card atop the search results. During its infancy, the AI feature was (sometimes) drawing information from satirical articles and Reddit/Quora threads and comments. This resulted in Overviews spewing inaccurate, nonsensical, and sometimes outright dangerous results.

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Google soon went into damage control mode, and subsequently set parameters to prevent information from the likes of Reddit and Quora from making its way to Overviews. The iPhone-maker, now, is in a similar boat, highlighting how unprepared Apple Intelligence currently is when it comes to handling summaries.

The Cupertino-based tech giant released its Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries with iOS 18.1 on iPhone 16 models, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max. The feature is meant to summarize any and all types of "long or stacked notifications," including text messages, app alerts, news, and entertainment-related notifications. The feature's implementation, however, has been inconsistent, especially when it comes to news summaries.

Soon after the feature's release, it was found to be spouting false news summaries, and rightfully so, it received a lot of backlash from news outlets including The BBC, Sky News, and more in the month of December 2024. Subsequently, even the National Union of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders had to urge the tech giant to remove or re-think its AI feature after it "[threatened] reliable journalism."

Like Google before it, Apple has some serious fine tuning to do

Source: BBC

More than a month after complaints first started emerging, Apple has begun taking action, albeit they're currently only reflected in beta, as highlighted by 9to5mac. The tech giant released iOS 18.3 beta and developer beta on January 16, and they feature several changes to the notification summary feature. For starters, Apple has outright disabled summaries for notifications stemming from news and entertainment applications. The tech giant will reportedly re-enable the feature down the line, likely after stringent internal testing.

Other changes include more prominent prompts that indicate the feature is still in beta, an option to disable notification summaries for an app directly from its notification, italicized font to distinguish notification summaries from regular notifications, alongside an explicit warning in the Settings app that says notification summaries "may contain errors."

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