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 false news alerts. Also, the company is making changes to the overall notification summary for greater transparency.

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

The change comes a few weeks after the BBC Complained to Apple One of its articles misrepresented that Luigi Mangioni, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself.

In addition to pulling up the notification summary for the selected app, all notification summaries will now be shown in italics to make it easier for users to tell them apart from regular notifications. Also, users will be able to disable notification summaries for a specific app directly from their lock screen.

Apple will begin 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 aren’t surprising, as Apple would make them last week Publish an update “To clarify” the text that appears in a notification summary is generated by Apple Intelligence. Some suspect that this will 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’s unknown when iOS 18.3 will be available to the general public.