Apple pauses news app notification summaries for displaying inaccurate information

Apple has temporarily stopped artificial intelligence (AI)-powered notification summaries for news and entertainment apps after it was found to be offering alerts with inaccurate information.

Notification summaries are one of the features powered by the Apple Intelligence personal smart system, which collects alerts from apps and displays a summary so the user can quickly catch up.

However, it has been detected that the summaries of news applications do not always offer accurate data. One of the outlets that has denounced it is the BBC, which in December pointed out a summary about Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in which it was said that he had shot himself. More recently, Apple’s AI showed, in another summary, that the Spanish tennis player Rafa Nadal had admitted to being gay.

These are just two examples of the inaccurate data and false information that has been displayed in notification summaries, leading Apple to temporarily pause it to improve transparency.

As reported on TechCrunch, the developer beta versions of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3 have shipped with digests disabled for news and entertainment apps.

Apple is currently working to make these summaries indicate that they are generated by Apple Intelligence, and will be displayed in italics to better distinguish them. Users will also be informed that this is a beta feature – which is not in a definitive development state – and that it may contain errors.