Apple pauses AI notification summaries for news after generating false alerts

Apple is pausing AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps after facing backlash for generating inaccurate news alerts. In addition, the company is introducing changes to notification summaries in general to allow for greater transparency.

With the latest round of developer previews for iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, Apple is disabling notification summaries entirely for all news and entertainment apps and will re-enable them in a future update after refinement.

The change comes a few weeks after the BBC complained to Apple after one of his articles was falsified to claim that Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself.

In addition to pulling notification summaries for selected apps, all notification summaries will now be shown in italics to make it easier for users to tell them apart from regular notifications. Additionally, users will be able to turn off notification summaries for a specific app directly from their Lock Screen.

Apple has also started notifying users that the notification summary feature is a beta feature when they enable the feature. This notification, found in the Settings app, will inform users that the feature may contain errors.

The changes are not a surprise, as Apple said last week release an update to “further clarify” that the text you see in a notification summary is generated by Apple Intelligence. Some suspected that this would be in the form of a new label or badge, but so far that is not the case.

While a public beta is expected to land next week, it is not known when iOS 18.3 will be available to the general public.