Apple has temporarily suspended the ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) Notification Summary’ function, which caused controversy over the creation of inaccurate news notifications. That is attracting attention as the primary case where Apple discontinued a service as a consequence of an AI hallucination issue.
TechCrunch and others reported on the sixteenth (local time) that Apple has disabled the AI ​​notification summary function of stories and entertainment apps in developer beta versions of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3 that were recently released.
This motion comes two weeks after the BBC raised the difficulty with Apple. Apple’s notification summary feature became controversial last month when it incorrectly sent out a BBC news report claiming that Luigi Mangione, who was arrested on suspicion of murdering United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had committed suicide.
Along with discontinuing news notifications, this developer beta version update includes several major changes.
This includes clearly indicating that the notification summary feature is in beta and adding an choice to disable app-specific notification summaries on the lock screen. Moreover, notification summaries are displayed in italics, and a message warning of possible errors has been added.
This update is currently available to developer beta testers, and the discharge schedule for general users has not yet been confirmed.
Meanwhile, Apple announced that it might be working on modifications to Apple Intelligence’s AI notification summary function after the BBC’s indicate.
This shouldn’t be the primary time a service has been discontinued as a consequence of AI hallucination issues. Google blocked the service in February last yr after receiving criticism that the image creation function of ‘Gemini’ distorted historical facts.
Apple is aware of this problem of hallucinations and has added a function to Apple Intelligence to create hallucinations which might be relatively less serious or have a lower probability of hallucinations.
Nevertheless, problems with the AI ​​notification summary have been identified ever because the beta test last yr, which eventually led to the temporary suspension of the service. That is an example that shows that Apple’s AI technology doesn’t yet reach the extent of Open AI or Google.
Reporter Park Chan cpark@aitimes.com
