Longtime tech journalist Jason Snell believes that Apple’s strategy to rectify the issues with Apple Intelligence summaries is insufficient, offering three recommendations for the company to consider.
The discussion comes in light of a series of troubling errors in the automated summaries of news articles, which have mistakenly reported that Luigi Mangione shot himself, declared a competition winner that hadn’t happened yet, and incorrectly claimed that a tennis player had come out publicly.
The Apple Intelligence Summaries Issue
A month ago, Apple’s new feature attracted attention due to its inability to accurately summarize headlines.
The BBC expressed dissatisfaction with Apple Intelligence’s notification summary feature, highlighting that it “generated a false headline” regarding Luigi Mangione, who was arrested this week as the suspected murderer of the United HealthGroup CEO. The problematic summary erroneously indicated that Mangione had shot himself.
Additional inaccuracies quickly surfaced.
One Apple-generated news summary incorrectly proclaimed that the darts player Luke Littler had won the PDC World Championship, even though he had yet to compete in the final. This misinformation was generated by AI, based on a BBC article discussing Littler’s semifinal victory on Thursday night.
Within hours, another AI-generated notification misled some BBC Sport app users into believing that tennis star Rafael Nadal had publicly come out as gay.
Initially, Apple remained silent, later stating that it is a beta feature and promising improvements in labeling AI-generated summaries.
Apple Intelligence features are currently in beta, and we are continually enhancing them based on user feedback. A forthcoming software update will further clarify when text shown is a summary produced by Apple Intelligence.
Snell’s Recommendations
Snell argues that Apple’s current approach does not go nearly far enough and dismisses the beta explanation as inadequate.
It’s difficult to accept “it’s in beta” as a valid excuse when these features have been incorporated into non-beta software releases that are heavily promoted as key benefits of Apple’s latest devices. […] Apple is delivering a feature that regularly alters headlines to make them incorrect. This is a clear failure and should not be dismissed as just part of what OS features are in the present era.
To start, Snell recommends that Apple enable developers to opt-out of having their apps featured in AI-generated summaries.
Secondly, the summaries should adopt different strategies based on the context.
It may be wise to create separate pathways for notifications of related content (like a series of emails or chat messages within a thread) compared to unrelated content (such as BBC headlines or podcast descriptions) and adjust how the unrelated information is summarized.
Lastly, to prevent summarizing content that is already summarized, AI should focus on the news article’s text rather than merely the headline.
DMN’s Perspective
This perspective is well-founded. Notably, granting app developers an opt-out option would create a beneficial scenario for all involved. It would enable organizations such as the BBC to confidently refuse participation in this beta phase. Furthermore, allowing developers to exercise this option would virtually provide Apple a way to divert liability, as it can maintain that participation is ultimately the developers’ choice.
Image: DMN composite of images from the BBC and Steven Van Elk on Unsplash
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