Apple has temporarily disabled a news summarising feature of Apple Intelligence which brought the company under scrutiny for consistently butchering the facts, according to a report by The Washington Post.
Examples of it getting facts wrong include it falsely claiming Pete Hegseth had been fired and Luigi Mangione shot himself, according to the report. It even said that Donald Trump had endorsed Tim Walz for president.
The feature was originally intended to help users catch up quickly on content from their notifications and lock screens.
It got disabled after Apple released a beta update for the software on Thursday, January 16, 2025.
Apple isn’t alone in this. The entire episode marks yet another example of the struggles tech companies face when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) ‘hallucinating’ or generating false facts.
Another example was when Google updated its search engine last year with AI-written answers to queries, it faced similar issues, making errors such as telling users to put glue on their pizza and saying Barack Obama was Muslim.
After all this, Google scaled down the feature by making it show up on lesser queries.
Apple meanwhile is working on improving the feature and will make it available again in a future update, according to the report.
This also comes after news organisations including the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) formally asking Apple to take action.
Apple has also made other changes with the iOS 18.3 beta software update such as a clearer notice that notification summaries can produce unexpected results, and a new italicized style for summarized notifications which would differentiate it from standard notifications.
Though this is the beta update, all iPhones which support Apple Intelligence will end up getting the update when iOS 18.3 gets a wider release.
The article originally appeared on Hindustan Times.
