Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers remarks at the start of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10, 2024 in Cupertino, California. Apple will announce plans to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into Apple software and hardware. (
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Apple has temporarily disabled Apple Intelligence summaries for news apps for users of its beta software in a sign of the challenges the company is dealing with in its AI technology.
The decision to pause AI summaries comes weeks after the BBC highlighted that Apple’s AI system had twisted its news notifications to display inaccurate facts. The pause only affects people using Apple’s beta software, not those using the company’s main operating systems.
News and entertainment apps, such as The New York Times, began showing a short message inside the iPhone settings app on Thursday noting that AI-powered summaries were “temporarily unavailable.”
The pause on one of Apple Intelligence’s core features highlights the challenge Apple faces in the roll out of its artificial intelligence technology, which has been scrutinized by many users on social media.
“With the latest beta software releases of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Notification summaries for the News & Entertainment category will be temporarily unavailable,” an Apple representative told CNBC in a statement.
The spokesperson noted that Apple is working on improvements to the software that are coming in a future software update. The company did not say when it will roll out its iOS 18.3 software to users of the main version of the iPhone operating system, but it could take weeks, based on Apple’s previous software release patterns.
The decision to temporarily pause the AI summaries comes on the same day that Apple saw its stock close down 4%, marking its worst day of trading since Aug. 5. A reason for the drop was due to notable Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo writing on Monday that the Apple Intelligence suite of features does not appear to be boosting iPhone sales.
Apple Intelligence struggles since launch
The company launched Apple Intelligence in October as the signature feature in its latest line of iPhone models and its answer to Silicon Valley’s AI arms race that kicked off with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.
Apple has used the AI features as the key selling point in its advertisements and marketing for its latest hardware products, but the software has been riddled with issues.
The company says that the entire Apple Intelligence system is in beta, and the update on Thursday added language to say that the AI software can produce unexpected results.
Apple Intelligence includes several features, including image generators, but the one that’s received the most attention is how it can summarize entire stacks of notifications into concise sentences — useful, according to Apple’s marketing materials, for getting through hundreds of group chat notifications without scrolling through the whole discussion.
With the Thursday update, Apple said it will show any AI-summarized notification in italics to distinguish them from other notifications.
In testing, Apple Intelligence summaries weren’t perfect, but the errors were mostly funny and obvious. Problems cropped up when the technology began being used to summarize news, and it displayed false information.
The most egregious well-documented error happened in December, when 22 separate BBC news notifications were combined into a three-part headline that started with “Luigi Mangione shoots himself.” The alleged Brian Thompson assassin has not done that.
The feature also combined headlines from The New York Times into a November notification that falsely said that Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested, according to a ProPublica reporter’s post on social media.
Another Apple Intelligence notification on Jan. 3 said that darts player Luke Littler had won a world championship, which had yet to take place, according to the BBC. The technology also conflated notifications from BBC’s sports app to say that “Brazilian tennis player, Rafael Nadal, comes out as gay.” Nadal is Spanish and is married to Maria Francisca Perello.
Apple on Thursday also rolled out a new feature that lets users turn off AI summaries for any app by swiping left on the notification from the phone’s lock screen. Users previously could only turn off AI summaries through the settings app.
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