A NOTIFICATION appeared on some iPhones carrying the BBC News logo. Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself, it said.

Except he had not. Mangione was alive and in custody. The BBC had published no such claim. Apple Intelligence grouped three BBC notifications into a single summary and turned one into a false statement. Following complaints from the BBC and other news organisations, Apple temporarily suspended notification summaries for news and entertainment apps.

The incident was widely treated as another AI error, but its implications went further. The BBC had done the reporting, yet AI had changed what potentially millions of users thought it had reported. Its name remained on the alert even though it no longer controlled the information attached to it.

Something similar is now happening on a much larger scale. People are turning to AI assistants with questions they once asked Google, journalists or experts, such as what happened in an election or why a war began.

In all fairness, search engines were never neutral to begin with. They decided whether a report from Dawn appeared beside an obscure Indian website presenting itself as a research platform, and most users rarely moved beyond the first few results. But users could still open the original reports, see where each claim came from and judge the sources. AI removes that step. It reads the material, summarises it and presents its own version of what happened.

This matters because........

© Dawn