Apple Halts Disastrous AI System That Was Making Up Fake News Stories and Pushing Them to iPhone Users

It's about time.

Failed Experiment

Apple has temporarily halted its disastrous "Apple Intelligence" feature which consistently bungled its one task of summarizing breaking news alerts.

An upcoming iOS 18.3 update will disable the summaries for news and entertainment apps, as the Washington Post's Geoffrey Fowler reports.

Apple's admission that its feature has failed is rare for the iPhone maker, and signals the egregiousness of the disaster: for over a month, the company's feature has been consistently botching the news reporting of real publications and pushing them to the company's untold millions of users.

Earlier this week, Fowler found that a recent push notification by the feature "got every fact wrong in its AI summary" of a story about Donald Trump's defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth.

"It's wildly irresponsible that Apple doesn't turn off summaries for news apps until it gets a bit better at this AI thing," Fowler wrote in his post on Bluesky.

Pathological AI

Apple seems to have listened, a change serving as a tacit admission of nagging issues plaguing large language model-based products. Despite several years of being in development, tools like Apple's summarizing tool are still struggling with "hallucinations," a problem some experts believe could be intrinsic to the tech.

Apple hasn't entirely given up on the feature, though, promising to bring it back after making changes.

In December, the BBC filed a complaint with the tech giant after the feature consistently botched summaries of its news reporting, going so far as to falsely state that Luigi Mangione, the man suspected of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself.

At first, Apple appeared to be unwilling to stop the experiment, telling the BBC in a statement that a "software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence."

But considering the latest news, the company seems to have changed its tune in light of growing pressure.

It's not just Apple — Google and OpenAI have also struggled to address the "hallucination" problem, with the former's AI search feature infamously telling people to put glue on their pizzas to make sure the toppings don't slide off.

More on the feature: Apple's AI Is Constantly Butchering Huge News Stories Sent to Millions of Users