Apple Intelligence Faces Fake News Problems, But One Important Change Can Solve It

Apple has promised to release a software update, summary notification (photo: x @CopyTrans)

JAKARTA Apple Intelligence's summary notice has caused a stir because it accidentally creates fake news, as highlighted by the BBC. Apple plans to change the user interface (UI), but here are the reasons why these changes are not enough and what is the real solution.

BBC News has expressed serious concerns about the failure of Apple Intelligence on two occasions, resulting in fake news.

Some examples include claims that: - A man committed suicide, even though he was still alive - an athlete won an unprecedented competition - an athlete claimed to be gay, even though it was not true

Apple has promised to release a software update that will "clearer when the text shown is a summary". Basically, UI changes are on their way, and Apple will continue to make a continuous backend revision of this beta feature.

If you've ever used a summary notification from Apple Intelligence, you may have also seen some misinformation.

In most cases, it's not too big a problem if iMessage or email is incorrectly summarized. But with news headlines, many of us just read the notifications.

Recently, Six Colors' Jason Snell outlined the improvements he put forward for this AI problem. The public may agree with Snell that Apple's UI fixes are insufficient. And maybe the company believes it can solve this issue with an unseen continuous fix.

However, there is a more effective solution, at least for the short term. Apple should disable summarys for news applications by default. Users can reactivate it if they wish, but for news apps only, this feature should have special opt-in requirements.

Why? Because many people only read the headline, not the full article. But also because it's 'very important' the headline is already a summary. News outlets have chosen words carefully to use in the headline to summarize article content. Apple doesn't need to mess it up by producing a 'conclusion from the summary' of their own.

In the BBC News example, a problematic summary is the result of Apple Intelligence summarizing a stack of different news notifications. Each individual notification retains its original content, but users see a stack of summarys.

To date, Apple has avoided major controversy with the image generation feature in iOS 18.2. That is a huge achievement that many of its competitors cannot achieve. However, a summary of AI news began to give similar headaches.

In the next 6 months or years, as Apple has improved its AI model and is out of beta, perhaps a summary of news apps can return by default. For now, one key change will make this problem disappear.