Rather than being perfected, the tool was ultimately temporarily retired. Earlier in January, Apple promised it would improve the news summaries that appear on iPhone as notifications because the artificial intelligence responsible for making them occasionally introduced errors. But on Thursday January 16, the American manufacturer finally decided to go further, according to Agence France-Presse, by completely removing this function from the experimental version of iOS, Beta 18.3. It was within the latter that the option was tested, in English-speaking countries. Apple specifies, however, that it plans to reintroduce these summaries after correcting them.
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The BBC and the New York Times had denounced the errors of this key functionality of Apple Intelligence, one of the most sensitive among this range of tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) that the Apple company is preparing for its most recent iPhones. These notifications summarizing several news alerts have, for example, given the winner of the world darts championship, even though it was not finished, wrongly claimed that the tennis player Rafael Nadal had revealed his homosexuality, or even assured that Luigi Mangione committed suicide after his arrest for the murder of the UnitedHealthcare boss, according to the BBC.
-Among the areas for improvement, Apple has committed to clarifying when summary text is provided by Apple Intelligence. These current affairs summaries were, in fact, until then very explicitly attributed to the BBC or the New York Timeswhose reputation is largely due to the reliability of their journalism.
Reporters Without Borders, for its part, is calling for the permanent withdrawal of this functionality, as the new labeling of summaries announced by Apple does not address the problem of false information that its tool sometimes generates. “This accident shows the extent to which generative AI-based services are still too immature to produce reliable information for the publicworried the NGO in a press release issued in December. They should not be authorized on the market for these uses. »
