BBC complains to Apple about misleading shooting headline

The BBC has complained to Apple after the tech giant’s new iPhone feature generated a false headline about a high-profile murder in the US.

Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier this weekuses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarize and group notifications.

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming that Luigi Mangione, the man arrested after the murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself . He doesn’t have that.

A BBC spokesman said the company had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and resolve the issue”.

Apple declined to comment.

“BBC News is the most trusted news outlet in the world,” the BBC spokesman added.

“It’s important to us that our audience can trust any information or journalism published in our name, and that includes notifications.”

The intelligence that made the false claim about Mangione was otherwise accurate in its summaries of the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and an update on South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

But the BBC doesn’t seem to be the only news publisher to have headlines misrepresented by Apple’s new AI technology.

On Nov. 21, three New York Times articles on different topics were combined into one notification — one of which read “Netanyahu Arrested,” referring to the Israeli prime minister.

It was an inaccurate summary of a newspaper report about the International Criminal Court issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, rather than any reporting that he had been arrested.

The error was highlighted on Bluesky by a reporter at the American investigative journalism website ProPublica.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify the screenshot, and the New York Times declined to comment to BBC News.

Apple says one of the reasons people might like its AI-powered notification overviews is to help reduce interruptions caused by ongoing notifications and to allow the user to prioritize more important notifications.

It is only available on certain iPhones – those using the iOS 18.1 system version or later on newer devices (all iPhone 16 phones, 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max). It is also available on some iPads and Macs.

Professor Petros Iosifidis, professor of media policy at City University in London, told BBC News that Apple’s mistake “looks embarrassing”.

“I can see the pressure to get to market first, but I’m surprised that Apple put their name on such a demonstrably half-baked product,” he said.

“Yes, there are potential benefits – but the technology is not there yet and there is a real danger of spreading misinformation.”

The grouped messages are marked with a specific icon and users can report any concerns they have on a message summary on their devices. Apple has not indicated how many reports it has received.

Apple Intelligence doesn’t just summarize publishers’ articles, it has been reported to digest emails and text messages has occasionally not quite hit the target.

And this isn’t the first time a major tech company has discovered that AI resumes don’t always work.

In May, in what Google described as “isolated examples,” its AI Overviews tool told Internet searches that some users looking for how to make cheese stick to pizza should consider using “non-toxic glue “.

The search engine’s AI-generated answer also said geologists recommend people eat a stone a day.