She informed about something that had not yet happened

Last year, Apple jumped on the artificial intelligence bandwagon when it introduced its Apple Intelligence. One of its functions, and undoubtedly one of the most useful, is the summary of notifications in a simple overview, which will be appreciated by everyone who receives dozens of notifications during the day. However, its potential is brought down by lack of follow-up, when the results do not correspond to reality.

The rocket hasn’t actually launched yet

One of her hiccups concerned SpaceX, which was preparing the launch of its largest Falcon 9 rocket with two lunar modules. One called Blue Ghost was built by Firefly for NASA, while the other is Japanese. Both of these missions were on the X social network, which, like SpaceX, belongs to Elon Musk.

Apple Intelligence misread the reports about mission preparations and claimed in its summary that both missions had already launched, although at that point the Falcon 9 with both pods had not yet left the launch pad. Defacto, AI was thus ahead of time and informed about something from the future. It shows the risks associated with automated data processing, especially when it comes to fast-moving events like space missions.

Apple Intelligence erroneously summarized the X network’s submissions and stated that the mission had already started | photo: Space Explored

The BBC is also complaining

However, the alert summary feature also struggles with factuality. For example, the BBC recently asked Apple to remove the feature after the system incorrectly summarized headlines and said the killer of the CEO of US health insurer United Healthcare had committed suicide. In another AI summary, for example, it falsely claimed that darts player Luke Littler had won the PDC World Championship before he had even entered the final. In another case, AI claimed to a user of the BBC Sport app that tennis player Rafael Nadal had posted his coming out and labeled him as gay.

Similar missteps are likely to be repeated. The notification summary feature that was added in iOS 18.1 is still in beta. Hopefully Apple can catch all her childhood illnesses soon and make it work the way it’s supposed to. Only then will they fulfill their potential.