The issue with fake news at Apple Intelligence can be resolved by a key change.

The summaries of Apple Intelligence notifications have sparked controversy by inadvertently spreading false news, as highlighted particularly by the BBC. Apple plans to modify the user interface, but here's why that won't be far enough and what a real solution could be.

The BBC sheds light on AI failures with Apple Intelligence summaries

BBC News has raised serious concerns twice about Apple's AI which inaccurately summarized news and consequently delivered false information.

Examples included claims such as:

• A person committed suicide, despite still being alive.
• An athlete won a competition that had not even taken place yet
• Another athlete came out as gay, which was also false

Apple has promised to send a software update that "clarifies more when the displayed text is a synthesis". In essence, a user interface change is arriving, and Apple will continue to make background revisions to the beta functionality.

If you were shown Apple Intelligence notifications summaries, you probably saw false information as well.

In most cases, it doesn't make much difference if an iMessage or email is incorrectly summarized. If you're like me, you'll likely read the original message at any cost.

With news headlines, for many of us, reading more than just the notification does not happen often.

That's why I think AI should exclude news applications by default from summaries.

The crucial solution necessary to summarize Apple Intelligence information

Recently, Jason Snell of Six Colors presented his own corrections for this AI problem. I agree with Snell who thinks that the interface user solution proposed by Apple is not elegant enough. And hey, maybe the company is convinced it can solve this problem through its continuous invisible improvements.

But there is a more effective solution, at least in the short term.

Apple should disable summaries for news applications.

Users can reactivate them if desired, but for news applications only, the feature should have a special registration requirement.

Why? Because many people read only headlines and not full articles.

But also because - very importantly - headlines are already summaries.

News editors have already carefully chosen the words they want to use in a headline to summarize an article's content.

Apple doesn't need to interfere with this by generating its own distinct summary.

In BBC News examples, the problematic summaries were the result of Apple Intelligence summarizing a stack of various news notifications. Each individual notification kept its original contents, but users saw the summarized stack.

This is a useful function, I admit it. Abandoning this summarized stack is a small discomfort to endure in exchange for ensuring that news alerts remain accurate.

Apple Intelligence false news: Summary

So far, Apple hasn't encountered a real controversy with its image generation features in iOS 18.2. It's a great achievement that many of its competitors couldn't accomplish. But news summaries on artificial intelligence are starting to cause similar headaches.

In six months or a year, when Apple has improved its AI models and moved out of the trial phase, news application summaries could possibly return by default. For now, however, a single key modification could solve this problem. And I suspect it won't be difficult to find many users who miss it—especially if the registration option remains.

What's your opinion on how Apple should correct its AI summary problem? Share your ideas in the comments.

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