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A characteristic of artificial intelligence on iPhones generates alerts of false news, stirring concerns about the ability of technology to spread disinformation.
Last week, a functionality recently launched by Apple This sums up user notifications using the AI, inaccurately pushed up the BBC News application notifications on the history of the broadcaster on the semi-final of the PDC Darts world championship, falsely affirming the player British Darts Luke Little had won the championship.
The incident occurred one day before the tournament final, which Littleler won.
Then, only a few hours after this incident, a distinct notification generated by Apple Intelligence, the IA system of the technology giant, claimed that the legend of tennis Rafael Nadal was gay.
The BBC has been trying for about a month to bring Apple to solve the problem. The British state diffuser Complains at Apple in December After his functionality has generated a false title suggesting that Luigi Mangione, the Man arrested after the murder From the Health Insurance Company United, CEO CEO, Brian Thompson, in New York, had fell – which never happened.
Apple was not immediately available to comment when it was contacted by CNBC. On Monday, Apple told the BBC that he worked on an update to resolve the problem by adding a clarification that shows when Apple Intelligence is responsible for the text displayed in notifications. Currently, the information notifications generated are presented directly from the source.
“Apple Intelligence’s features are in a beta version and we are continuously making improvements using user comments,” the company said in a press release shared with the BBC. Apple added that this encourages users to report a concern if they see an “unexpected notification summary”.
The BBC is not the only press organization which has been affected by the Apple Intelligence summarizing in an inaccurate manner the news notifications. In November, the functionality sent an abbreviated notification of the AI wrongly demand that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.
The error was reported on the application of Bluesky social media by Ken Schwencke, editor -in -chief of the Propublica investigation journalism site.
CNBC contacted the BBC and the New York Times to comment on Apple’s proposed solution to the problem of disinformation of its AI function.
AI disinformation problem
Apple boasts its Summary of the notification generated by AI As an effective way to group and rewrite the previews of news application notifications in a single alert on the user’s lock screen.
It is an Apple feature said is designed to help users scan their notifications for key details and reduce the dam in updates that many smartphones users know.
However, this has resulted in the IA experts calling for “hallucinations” – the responses generated by AI which contain false or misleading information.
“I suspect that Apple will not be the only one to have challenges with the content generated by AI. The research firm CCS Insights, told CNBC.
In the case of Apple, because AI tries to consolidate the notifications and condense them to show that a basic summary of information, he crushed the words together in a way that characterizes the events inaccurate – But presenting them with confidence as facts.
“Apple had the additional complexity of trying to compress the content in very short summaries, which ended up broadcasting erroneous messages,” added Wood. “Apple will undoubtedly seek to remedy it as soon as possible, and I am sure that the rivals will watch closely to see how it reacts.”
The generative AI works by trying to find the best possible answer to a question or a prompt inserted by a user, based on large amounts of data on which his underlying language models are formed.
Sometimes AI may not know the answer. But because it has been scheduled to always present an answer to the user prompts, this can lead to cases where AI is effectively.
It is not clear exactly when Apple’s resolution in the bug in its notification summary function will be corrected. The iPhone manufacturer has said we are expecting what we have happened in “the next few weeks”.