…by making stuff up and publishing it!
From the BBC: “The BBC made a complaint to the US tech giant after Apple Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications, falsely created a headline about murder suspect Luigi Mangione. The AI-powered summary falsely made it appear that BBC News had published an article claiming Mangione, the man accused of the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not. Now, the group Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the technology. Apple has made no comment.”
This must make human journalists shiver in their boots! If an AI bot can create fake news stories like Hunter Biden’s laptop being just Russian information, the U.S. economy doing great, President Joe Biden being sharp as a tack and Donald Trump emulating Nazis by holding a rally in Madison Square Garden,” who needs live lying reporters to mislead the public and generate fake news?
Reporters Without Borders, also known as RSF,sadit was was “very concerned by the risks posed to media outlets” by AI tools like Apple’s. See? They see the threat!
The group also said the BBC incident proves that “generative AI services are still too immature to produce reliable information for the public.” But hat proof evident long before this incident: Remember “Hunter de Butts?” Michael Cohen’s AI fiasco?
Vincent Berthier, the head of RSF’s technology and journalism desk, explained the obvious: “AIs are probability machines, and facts can’t be decided by a roll of the dice. RSF calls on Apple to act responsibly by removing this feature. The automated production of false information attributed to a media outlet is a blow to the outlet’s credibility and a danger to the public’s right to reliable information on current affairs.”
Apple has made no comment since the story broke last week.
[NOTICE of Correction: I originally wrote, “but the “BBC is the real ethics dunce here. As I told a class of D.C. lawyers just this week, the ABA and the DC Bar have issued ethics opinions stating that if a lawyer or a firm is going to use a bot to do research or prepare documents, its work must be checked carefully just as if the work was being done by a paralegal, an intern, or any other non-lawyer. For the same reason, a news outlet can’t ethically have system where an AI bot can publish whatever it wants without a human reviewing the content. However, as we all know or should, our news organizations (and the UK’s, apparently) are not ethical. They are lazy, careless, irresponsible and untrustworthy. Just like bots!”
This was wrong, and several commenters made the point: Apple released its fake news as if BBC was doing it, but BBC had no control over the bot’s conduct. Apple, however, surely does, and it is unethical in the extreme to let an unmonitored AI run amuck.
Ethics Alarms 
I think there is a misunderstanding here? The BBC is dunceworthy in many ways, but the BBC has no control over Apple’s AI or what Apple shows its users on Apple-branded products.
This issue is that Apple is publishing false AI-generated headlines that are misrepresented as articles from the BBC. These are being shown to Apple users on Apple devices. The BBC has nothing to do with Apple’s false headlines.
I think the real issue is that Apple’s posting appears to be from the BBC instead of it’s own summary. It should be labeled: “Our AI generated summary of BBC headlines” instead of just “BBC news”. It feels like something between trademark infringement and libel.
How does Apple publish fake news under the BBC banner? Why did BBC allow Apple to publish even accurate news that way?
This AI stuff brings two things to my mind”
In the spirit of electric vehicles, perhaps there should be serious research and testing before inflicting a new product on the public.