Apple Pulls AI-Generated Notifications For News After Generating Fake Headlines

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Apple is temporarily pulling its newly introduced artificial intelligence feature that summarizes news notifications after it repeatedly sent users error-filled headlines, sparking backlash from a news organization and press freedom groups. The rare reversal from the iPhone maker on its heavily marketed Apple Intelligence feature comes after the technology produced misleading or altogether false summaries of news headlines that appear almost identical to regular push notifications.

On Thursday, Apple deployed a beta software update to developers that disabled the AI feature for news and entertainment headlines, which it plans to later roll out to all users while it works to improve the AI feature. The company plans to re-enable the feature in a future update. As part of the update, the company said the Apple Intelligence summaries, which users must opt into, will more explicitly emphasize that the information has been produced by AI, signaling that it may sometimes produce inaccurate results.

What happened to prototyping and testing?

[ozmartian]

Why rush these things out to producytiob before you are even aware of the results?

Re:

[Rinnon]

This is what happens when you drink your own kool-aid.

Re: What happened to prototyping and testing?

[paul_engr]

If you test, people can rightfully tell you that your shit sucks. Remember, Apple is a cult. Cult leaders don't like pesky shit like factual, observable reality getting in the way of the farting anus on a big movie screen. Laugh at that farting asshole, you stupid fuck, then tell your friends about it on iMessage.

Re:

[gweihir]

Simple: These "features" are known to be broken and there is no known way to fix that. Hence you can either deploy in a broken state or you cannot deploy. They clearly decided to deploy for marketing and political reasons and they badly misestimated how broken LLMs actually are.

Re:

[Fly Swatter]

It's dead, Jim.

Re:

[mjwx]

Why rush these things out to producytiob before you are even aware of the results?

Same thing that happened to proof reading... I keed, I keed.

Apple are known for sniffing their own farts a little too much. Releasing a product that doesn't work then blaming the user for "holding it wrong". They're just not able to get away with claiming the BBC was "holding" it's headlines wrong when Apple made a hash of it these days.

Re:

[nightflameauto]

This is what we refer to as "two factor failure payload."

1. The tech companies are used to testing new features on users, because for the most part the worst that happens is somebody doesn't like formatting on their spreadsheet or something hiccups on the network a bit. They aren't about to set aside that practice just because a new feature might have dangers they hadn't considered.

2. AI is the biggest craze in the land and *EVERY* tech company is trying, desperately, to claw their way to the top of the mou

What's the problem?

[Black Parrot]

Don't they know fake news is what everyone wants these days?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Joke's on them, it's the fascist pigs who voted for the convict/rapist/pedophile/traitor who lap up the fake news, they don't buy Apple products.

Re:

[taustin]

Since the fascist pigs outnumber you by enough to win control of the White House and both houses of Congress, I'd say you're the freak of nature.

Re:

[gweihir]

Soo, evil becomes ok if enough people do it?

Solution

[Dan East]

The solution to AI hallucinations: a disclaimer that AI produced it.
If an actual news organization published a false headline they'd potentially be sued into oblivion.

Re:

[gweihir]

That really depends. Stock manipulation, causing panic, causing civil unrest, etc. are all illegal and your only possible defense is that you were _not_ lying.

Re:

[nightflameauto]

That really depends.

Stock manipulation - appears to be OK so long as the manipulator is above a certain monetary value

causing panic - Again appears to be OK so long as the manipulator belongs to the correct political party at the time

causing civil unrest - Goes hand in hand with the previous point. Once again, OK, so long as the manipulator belongs to the correct political party at the time

are all illegal - Only if you're poor or not associated with the correct political party.

and your only possible defense is that you wer

Re:

[gweihir]

Well, yes. Tragic as that is.

Why would you even do that?

[VanGarrett]

I am struggling to understand the motivation for using AI to re-write headlines. The headlines are already written. If you want to use AI to curate the headlines your customers see, that makes sense to me. That's not what Apple was doing, though. It seems like a lot of CPU time burned to perform a task that's already done.