Simon Willison’s Weblog

14th December 2024 - Link Blog

BBC complains to Apple over misleading shooting headline. This is bad: the Apple Intelligence feature that uses (on device) LLMs to present a condensed, summarized set of notifications misrepresented a BBC headline as "Luigi Mangione shoots himself".

Ken Schwencke caught that same feature incorrectly condensing a New York Times headline about an ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu as "Netanyahu arrested".

My understanding is that these notification summaries are generated directly on-device, using Apple's own custom 3B parameter model.

The main lesson I think this illustrates is that it's not responsible to outsource headline summarization to an LLM without incorporating human review: there are way too many ways this could result in direct misinformation.

Update 16th January 2025: Apple plans to disable A.I. features summarizing news notifications, by Tripp Mickle for the New York Times.