Apple has temporarily disabled Apple Intelligence summaries in its news app for users of its beta software, a sign of the challenges the company faces with its AI technology.
The decision to pause AI summaries comes weeks after the BBC pointed out that Apple’s AI system was distorting news alerts to convey inaccurate facts. The suspension only affects users of Apple’s beta software, not users of the company’s main operating system.
News and entertainment apps such as The New York Times displayed a brief message in the iPhone’s Settings app on Thursday stating that AI summaries were “temporarily unavailable.”
The suspension of one of Apple Intelligence’s key features highlights the challenges the company faces in rolling out its artificial intelligence technology, which has been widely criticized 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.
A spokesperson said Apple is working on improving the software, which will be released in a future software update. The company did not say when it would roll out iOS 18.3 software to users of the major version of the iPhone operating system, but it could be several weeks based on Apple’s previous software release patterns.
The decision to suspend AI summary came on the same day that Apple shares fell 4% at the close of trading, their worst trading day since August 5. One reason for the sales decline is that prominent Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote on Monday that Apple’s suite of intelligence features does not appear to be boosting iPhone sales.
Apple Intelligence has struggled since its launch
The company introduced Apple Intelligence in October as a signature feature of its latest iPhone lineup and as a response to the AI arms race in Silicon Valley that began with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2017.
Apple has used its AI capabilities as a key selling point in advertising and marketing its latest hardware products, but the software has been riddled with problems.
The company said the entire Apple Intelligence system is still in beta, and Thursday’s update included an additional warning that the AI software may produce unexpected results.
Apple Intelligence includes several features, including image generation, but the one that’s garnering the most attention is the ability to summarize an entire batch of notifications into a concise sentence. According to Apple’s marketing materials, it’s useful for sifting through hundreds of group chat notifications, which would otherwise require scrolling through the entire discussion.
In an update on Thursday, Apple announced that all notifications aggregated by the AI will now be displayed in italics to distinguish them from other notifications.
In tests, Apple Intelligence summaries weren’t perfect, but most of the errors were amusing and obvious. Problems arose when the technology was first used to summarize news and display incorrect information.
The most serious and well-documented error occurred in December, when 22 separate BBC news bulletins were summarized into a three-part headline that began with “Luigi Mangione commits suicide.” Brian Thompson’s murder suspect didn’t do that.
According to a social media post by a ProPublica reporter, the post also combined a New York Times headline with a November article that falsely claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.
Another Apple Intelligence alert on January 3 reported that darts player Luke Littler had won a world championship that the BBC said had yet to take place. The technology also integrated notifications from the BBC’s Sports app, which reported “Brazilian tennis player, Rafael Nadal, comes out as gay.” Nadal is Spanish and married to Maria Francisca Perello.
Apple also announced a new feature on Thursday that lets users turn off AI summaries in any app by swiping left on notifications on their phone’s lock screen. Previously, users could only disable AI summaries through the Settings app.
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