I can’t stop thinking about this news item on the BBC, complaining once again about the incorrect headline summaries Apple’s Artificial Intelligence is creating based on their stories. In particular here, it claimed Luke Littler won the darts championship before he had (although he later did which I think wasn’t a surprise to anyone). It also claimed Rafael Nadal had come out as gay, based on a story about a different tennis player. As far as I can see, Nadal isn’t even mentioned in that original post.

What is going on here? It’s so awful. The BBC and other news outlets are quite rightly complaining that their journalistic integrity is being called into question - the headlines look like they’re coming from the broadcaster themselves, they are in the styled notifications with the relevant logo. But they have absolutely no control over what is being conjured up by the so-called intelligence.

What makes it worse, for me, is that different people are seeing different things, because the intelligence could create slightly different things depending on what it has learned. This is so terrible. We’re already in a world where the same headline can mean vastly different things to people and creates hugely varying reactions… polarising, society-crumbling reactions. To then be tailoring notifications so that the same story has different summaries is downright irresponsible and for that to be incorrect on top of everything is outrageous.

As Mr C so wisely said on Bluesky: “Apple rushed their AI tools to show they’re not lagging behind the competition. Instead they’ve shown they are much, much further behind than anyone suspected.”

Dangerously behind. If you have the feature and haven’t already disabled it, head to settings, notifications and switch those summaries off.