BBC Complains to Apple Over Misleading Shooting Headline ⇥ bbc.com

Graham Fraser, BBC News:

Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier this week, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications.

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

Fraser also points to an inaccurate summary attributed to the New York Times. Even scrolling through my notifications right now, I can see misleading summaries. One, interpreted by Apple Intelligence as a story about a “vaccine lawyer helps pick health officials”, actually refers to an anti-vaccine lawyer who thinks immunizing against polio is dangerous. I have seen far dumber examples since this feature became part of beta builds over the past months.

I am not opposed to the concept of summarized text. It can, in theory, be helpful to glance at my phone and know whether I need to respond to something sooner rather than later. But every error chips away at a user’s trust, to the point where they need to double-check for accuracy — at which point, the summary is creating additional work.

I can see why the BBC is upset about this, particularly after years of declining trust in media. I had notification summaries switched on for only select few apps. I have now ensured they are turned off for news apps.

Update: Markus Müller-Simhofer:

If you are using macOS 15.2, please be careful with those priority alerts. It listed a fraud email as priority for me.

This is not just a one-off. I have also seen this in my own use. Mail also repeatedly decided to prioritize “guest contributor” spam emails over genuinely useful messages like shipping notifications. Sometimes, it works as expected and is useful; sometimes, the priority message feature simply does not show up. It is bizarre.