Op-eds

The AI wars have begun with Apple vs the BBC — it’s like having Kent Brockman in your pocket

8 Jan 2025

I can’t think of a more glaring example of how AI should not be used than what Apple is doing here with BBC headlines, summaries and notifications.

Straight out of the gate Apple “Intelligence” was all promise and no delivery. The only decent tech reviewer on the internet pointed out that the iPhone last September was sold on the PROMISE of AI (it was plastered all over the marketing) without a single AI feature available to the public when it shipped. Well, now those features are creeping into our lives and although every day I think about how I would like AI to eat all the software on my phone, as Microsoft is promising, and just be a chatbot, instead we have a host of largely irrelevant and now destructive features.

The BBC, on its website yesterday, ran a rather meek story saying it has been complaining for ages about how Apple’s AI service has been garbling their stories through its fancy notification rewriting feature. So, if you get a story alert from the BBC app, your iPhone takes the story, imbues it with errors and then puts it in your notification feed.

Apple has previously said its notification summaries allow you to “scan for key details”. However, the BBC says: “These AI summarisations by Apple do not reflect – and in some cases completely contradict – the original BBC content.”

They are at the mercy of Apple, because it is through this AI feature that iPhone users are going to be largely absorbing their news.

It is particularly weird behaviour from the tech giant, because I think anyone who has even sparingly used ChatGPT probably asked themselves how Apple was going to use AI to compress and rewrite notifications while mitigating mistakes and hallucinations in the rewriting process. Turns out, they didn’t think that would be a problem…

“On Friday, Apple’s AI inaccurately summarised BBC app notifications to claim that Luke Littler had won the PDC World Darts Championship hours before it began – and that the Spanish tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay,” said the BBC article. Basically, it’s like having your own Kent Brockman in your pocket. It is declaring winners of events that haven’t even happened and outing people who aren’t gay.

The sad part about this, even for a juggernaut like the BBC, is that they are at the mercy of Apple, because it is through this AI feature that iPhone users are going to be largely absorbing their news.

Read more: AI now has the remarkable power to change your opinion — on any subject

Read more: AI is becoming firmly entrenched, but questions are being asked over its future development

I have spent the past few years teaching AI implementation in newsrooms all around the world and a golden lesson for journalists that I try to impress on them is: don’t use AI when you can do the job better yourself, especially if it introduces a high risk of creating errors in the process. I can’t think of a more glaring example of how AI should not be used than what Apple is doing here, because the original headlines, summaries and notifications already exist (written diligently by a BBC employee) and they are in your phone for you to read.

We agonise about misinformation going viral, but Apple is essentially blocking the correct story from you and creating a fake one right on your handset.

The tech giant has said it will gracefully deliver us an update that will “clarify” the notifications, but it is still a formidable advert for how the AI revolution is going to be bumpy at best. DM

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