BBC Complains To Apple Over Misleading AI-Generated Headlines

Matthew Broersma,
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smartphone, iPhone XR, apple

BBC complains to Apple over inaccurate AI-generated information in summaries of notifications from news apps, raising misinformation risk

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The BBC has complained to Apple over a notification from the company’s new Apple Intelligence AI technology that generated a false headline.

The AI feature, which summarises notifications from mobile apps, displayed a summary stating that Luigi Mangione, the suspect arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance chief executive Brian Thompson last week, had shot himself, which is false.

The BBC said it had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”. It said Apple had declined to comment.

“It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name and that includes notifications,” the corporation said in a statement.

Notification showing inaccurate summary of BBC News headlines. Image credit: BBC
Image credit: BBC

Misinformation risk

The issue is a fresh example of inaccurate information being generated by the AI technologies that are being rapidly rolled out for broad public use by tech firms including Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Apple’s take on the technology, which has been released for newer iPhones, iPads and Macs, has already been criticised for generating summaries of emails or other notifications that can be inscrutable, bizarre or incorrect.

The problem is more noticeable when applied to notifications from news apps.

One of the AI features groups together notifications from a particular app and summarises the contents of all of them, in an effort to reduce distraction.

In the case referenced by the BBC, the AI-generated notification accurately summarised two other headlines.

In a similar issue, on 21 November, three headlines from The New York Times were grouped together, with the AI-generated summary indicating one of them was about the “arrest” of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Notification showing inaccurate summary of New York Times headline. Image source: Ken Schwencke
Image source: Ken Schwencke

Inaccurate headlines

In reality, the headline stated that the International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

That mistake was highlighted on social media platform Bluesky by a journalist with investigative journalism site ProPublica, the BBC said.

In May, after Google launched AI summaries of search results, users found the summaries were often bizarre or incorrect.

Google temporarily scaled back the feature’s roll-out soon afterward, before resuming its deployment later in the year.