Another day, another report of tech companies' weird obsession with artificial intelligence making the world a cruddier, harder to understand place. This is per the BBC, which reports that colleagues at BBC News were not especially happy with Apple's new Apple Intelligence feature, which recently went live in the U.K.. Among other generally useless toys, Apple Intelligence offers a feature that summarizes notifications, often in ways that are slightly less than helpful, and which can sometimes save upwards of seconds of brain-taxing reading. This can be irritating, or even amusing, when it comes to things like paraphrased texts; when applied to news stories—as it was with a recent BBC News story about United Healthcare assassination suspect Luigi Mangione—it can cross the line into outright disinformation.
Although it didn't clarify which news story, exactly, was being shortened, the BBC article in question showed a screenshot of Apple Intelligence apparently summarizing a headline as "Luigi Mangione shoots himself," a blatant falsehood appearing to run under the BBC News label. (The same BBC article also cites reports of Apple Intelligence pulling a similar muddling of a headline about Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu.) As it turns out, journalists—who are not already wild about what AI propagation has done to the general information quality of the internet over the last few years—really don't like it when a computer takes an article, turns it into an outright lie, and pushes it out to people with their name attached, and so BBC News has issued a complaint to Apple, asking it to please knock this shit off, or at least make this shit less clearly wrong if it's not going to knock it off. (It is obviously not going to knock it off, because tech companies have been plowing huge amounts of time and money into this stuff in the cheerful confidence that someone will find an actual use for it at some point for a while now. The future: Worse.)
