As a sign of the difficulties the business is seeing with its AI technology, Apple has temporarily disabled Apple Intelligence summaries for news apps for users of its beta software.

Weeks after the BBC revealed that Apple’s AI system had distorted its news notifications to show false information, the company decided to halt AI summaries. Only users of Apple’s beta software are impacted by the pause; users of the company’s primary operating systems are unaffected.

The New York Times and other news and entertainment apps started displaying a brief notice within the iPhone settings app on Thursday, stating that AI-powered summaries were “temporarily unavailable.”

An Apple representative told CNBC in a statement that “Notification summaries for the News & Entertainment category will be temporarily unavailable with the latest beta software releases of iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS Sequoia 15.3.” The halt on one of Apple Intelligence’s core features underscores the difficulty Apple faces in implementing its artificial intelligence technology, which has been closely examined by numerous users on social media.

According to the representative, Apple is working on software enhancements that will be included in a future software update. Based on Apple’s past software release trends, the company did not specify when it would issue iOS 18.3 to users of the primary iPhone operating system, but it may take weeks.

The decision to temporarily halt the AI summaries coincides with Apple’s stock closing 4% down, its lowest trading day since August 5. Ming-Chi Kuo, a well-known supply chain expert for Apple, wrote on Monday that the Apple Intelligence suite of features does not seem to be increasing iPhone sales, which contributed to the decline.

Since introduction, Apple Intelligence has struggled.
In response to Silicon Valley’s AI arms race, which began with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, the business introduced Apple Intelligence in October as the standout feature in its most recent lineup of iPhone models.

In its marketing and advertising for its newest hardware goods, Apple has emphasized the AI functions as the main selling point; yet, the software has been plagued by problems.

The entire Apple Intelligence system is in beta, according to the company, and the Thursday update included text stating that the AI software may provide surprising outcomes.

Although Apple Intelligence has a number of features, such as image generators, its ability to condense lengthy notification stacks into brief sentences has drawn the most attention. According to Apple’s marketing materials, this feature is helpful for navigating through hundreds of group chat notifications without having to read through the entire conversation.

Apple stated that in order to differentiate AI-summarized messages from conventional notifications, it will display them in italics starting with the Thursday update.

Although Apple Intelligence summaries weren’t flawless during testing, the majority of the mistakes were humorous and clear. When the technology started to be used to summarize news, issues arose since it presented inaccurate information.

The most egregious and well-documented mistake occurred in December, when a three-part headline beginning with “Luigi Mangione shoots himself” was created by combining 22 different BBC news notices. That is not what the purported assassin of Brian Thompson has done.

According to a social media post by a ProPublica reporter, the feature also merged stories from The New York Times into a notification in November that made false claims about the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to the BBC, another Apple Intelligence message on January 3 claimed that darts player Luke Littler had won a global championship that had not yet been held. Additionally, the technology confused BBC sports app alerts to claim that “Brazilian tennis player, Rafael Nadal, comes out as gay.” Spanish-born Rafael Nadal is wed to Maria Francisca Perello.

On Thursday, Apple also introduced a new feature that allows users to swipe left on the notification from the phone’s lock screen to disable AI summaries for any app. Previously, users had to use the settings app to disable AI summaries.