Apple CEO Cook delivers a speech at the opening ceremony of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino, California on June 10, 2024. Apple will announce plans to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into Apple software and hardware. (
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apple Apple Intelligence has temporarily disabled its ability to provide news app summaries for users of its beta software, a sign of the challenges the company faces with artificial intelligence technology.
The decision to pause artificial intelligence summaries comes after The British Broadcasting Corporation emphasizes Apple’s artificial intelligence system distorted its news notifications to show inaccurate facts. The suspension only affects users of Apple’s beta software, not those of the company’s main operating system.
On Thursday, news and entertainment apps like The New York Times began displaying a text message in the iPhone Settings app stating that the AI-powered summary was “temporarily unavailable.”
The suspension of a core Apple Intelligence feature highlights the challenges Apple faces in rolling out artificial intelligence technology that has been closely watched by many users on social media.
“With the release of the latest beta software for iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3, notification summaries for the News and Entertainment categories will be temporarily unavailable,” an Apple representative told CNBC in a statement.
The spokesperson pointed out that Apple is working hard to improve the software and will launch it in a future software update. The company did not say when it would launch the iOS 18.3 software to users of the main version of the iPhone operating system, but based on Apple’s previous software release model, it may take several weeks.
Apple shares closed down 4% on the same day it decided to temporarily suspend AI summaries, marking a decline in its stock price Worst trading day One reason for the decline in iPhone sales since August 5 is that well-known Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote on Monday that Apple’s smart feature suite does not seem to be boosting iPhone sales.
Apple Intelligence has struggled since launch
The company launched Apple Intelligence in October as a signature feature of its latest iPhone models and as a response to Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence arms race, which kicked off with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.
Apple has used artificial intelligence capabilities as a major selling point in the advertising and marketing of its latest hardware products, but the software has been plagued with problems.
The company said the entire Apple Intelligence system is in testing, and Thursday’s update added language and said artificial intelligence software can produce unexpected results.
Apple Intelligence includes a variety of features, including an image generator, but what gets the most attention is how it summarizes entire stacks of notifications into concise sentences — which, according to Apple’s marketing materials, is great for browsing hundreds of group chat notifications without scrolling. Useful for the entire discussion.
Apple said that with Thursday’s update, it will display any AI-aggregated notifications in italics to distinguish them from other notifications.
In testing, Apple Intelligence’s summaries weren’t perfect, but the errors were mostly interesting and obvious. The problem arises when technology starts to be used to summarize news, showing falsehoods.
Worst Documented Error takes place in decemberwhen 22 separate BBC News notices were combined into a three-part headline that began with “Luigi Manchione shoots himself.” The so-called assassin of Brian Thompson didn’t do that.
The feature also merges New York Times headlines into November Notice According to a social media post by a ProPublica reporter, the news falsely stated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.
Another Apple Intelligence notification on January 3 claimed that darts player Luke Littler had won the yet-to-be-held world championship, According to the British Broadcasting Corporation. The technology also incorporates notifications from the BBC Sport app and says “Brazilian tennis player Rafael Nadal has come out as gay.” Nadal is Spanish and married to Maria Francesca Perello .
Apple also launched a new feature on Thursday that allows users to turn off artificial intelligence snippets for any app by swiping left on notifications on the phone’s lock screen. Previously, users could only turn off AI summarization through the Settings app.
