Apple Plans to Disable A.I. Summaries of News Notifications

Less than six months after rolling out a series of artificial intelligence features, Apple is disabling one of its signature capabilities: aggregating and summarizing news notifications.

The company revealed the change on Thursday in a software update for developers. It followed an outcry from British media outlets that Apple’s software was misrepresenting news reports.

In December, the BBC was among the first to urge Apple to change its software. The call came after the BBC sent readers a notification about Luigi Mangione, the man arrested in the killing of Brian Thompson, the health insurance executive, in New York City. Some iPhones summarized BBC news stories by saying, “Luigi Mangione shoots himself.” He had not.

In addition to disabling news summaries, Apple said it would add a warning for users who opted in to receive notification summaries for other apps. The warning will say that the feature is still in development, and that there could be errors.

The flawed summaries feature is the latest in a series of issues that have marred new A.I. products. Last year, Google unveiled a chatbot that recommended people eat rocks and use glue to make pizza. Microsoft postponed features in an A.I. computer because of security vulnerabilities. And Humane, a start-up that raised $240 million for a device called the Ai Pin, was panned by tech reviewers because its system sometimes fielded requests inaccurately.

The early struggles with A.I. products have fueled questions about the technology’s near-term potential. The technology, which can answer questions, create images and write code, has been heralded for its potential to disrupt businesses and create trillions of dollars in economic value. But some on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley have expressed doubts about whether A.I. will quickly produce enough benefits to justify its staggering costs.