SaMedia, Dec. 13— The BBC has lodged a complaint with Apple after the tech giant’s new AI-powered notification feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the United States, news outlet says.
Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier this week, uses artificial intelligence to summarize and group notifications. However, the system falsely suggested that BBC News had reported Luigi Mangione, the man arrested for the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. However, Mangione has not taken his own life.
The misleading notification, which appeared on an iPhone, also included accurate summaries about the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and a police raid on South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s office.
The BBC spokesperson emphasized the importance of trust in its journalism. “BBC News is the most trusted news media in the world,” the spokesperson said. “It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name, including notifications.”
The BBC is not the only news publisher to have its headlines misrepresented by Apple’s AI feature. On November 21, a notification grouping three unrelated articles from the New York Times inaccurately claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested. The summary was based on a report about an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, not an actual arrest.
Apple’s AI-powered notification summaries are designed to reduce interruptions by grouping notifications and prioritizing important updates. The feature is available on certain iPhones running iOS 18.1 or later, as well as some iPads and Macs.
Professor Petros Iosifidis, a media policy expert at City University in London, told the BBC that the mistake appeared “embarrassing.”
“I can see the pressure to get to the market first, but I am surprised that Apple put their name on such a demonstrably half-baked product,” he told the outlet.
Users can report concerns about notification summaries directly on their devices, but Apple has not disclosed how many reports it has received.
