Apple Intelligence Under Fire For Bungling More News Headlines, Apple Responds

The rollout of Apple Intelligence has been a rough, with features being released piecemeal through a series of updates to iOS 18, iPad OS 18 and macOS 15. Despite these operating systems having launched several months ago, there are still missing features that the company sold customers on. Unfortunately for Apple, the optics of its struggling AI aren’t getting any better with its latest failure.

This most recent gaffe came by way of the notification summaries feature, which attempts to distill information into short and easy-to-digest notifications for users. Unfortunately, instead of being informative, it has been observed displaying misleading stories from the BBC. For example, it notified users about the winner of the PDC Darts World Championship before the event had even taken place. Another notification stated incorrectly that tennis player Rafael Nadal had come out as a gay man due to mistakenly conflating this detail from a story that happened to also involve Nadal.


This isn’t the first time Apple has been called out for this issue. Late last year, the notification summaries feature was displaying incorrect information regarding the news surrounding the high profile murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Users were shown a notification stating that the suspect had taken his own life, when in reality he was under the custody of law enforcement.

This is simply a bad look for Apple. It’s one thing for its AI offerings, such as generative AI tools, to be lackluster, but it’s a completely different ball game to be a delivery mechanism for hallucinated misinformation. All this does is diminish trust in news sources, alongside damaging the company’s brand. 

Apple says that it’s working on a software update to correct this issue. However, if it can’t get a handle on the problem soon, it should strongly consider disabling this feature for news apps.