The BBC has expressed dissatisfaction with the notification summary feature of Apple Intelligence. The organization claims that this feature “produced an erroneous headline” regarding Luigi Magione, who was arrested this week as a suspect in the murder of the United HealthGroup CEO.
The notification summary in question implied that Mangione had committed suicide: “Luigi Mangione shoots himself; Syrian mother hopes Assad pays the price; South Korea police raid Yoon Suk Yeol’s office.”
The notification summarization feature is a component of Apple Intelligence, launched with iOS 18.1. These summaries appear atop a cluster of notifications from the same application. Users can select the summary to expand it and see the complete stack of notifications along with their original content.
The precise wording of the original notification that resulted in this misleading summary about Mangione remains unclear. It seems that Apple Intelligence amalgamated three headline notifications from the BBC News app, with each separated by a semicolon within the summary.
The summary from Apple Intelligence accurately conveyed the two other headlines (one related to Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and another regarding South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol).
“BBC News is recognized as the most reliable news media outlet globally,” stated a BBC representative. “It is vital that our audience can have confidence in any information or journalism published under our name, including notifications.”
The BBC has reached out to Apple “to address this concern and remedy this issue.” Apple has yet to provide a comment.
Furthermore, the BBC highlighted a post on Bluesky illustrating how Apple Intelligence misunderstood a New York Times headline concerning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Such issues are not unique to Apple Intelligence and can affect any services powered by a large language model. You have the option to manage which notifications are summarized on your iPhone by navigating to the Settings app, selecting “Notifications,” and then choosing “Summarize Notifications.”
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