rsynnott 3 months ago

> When the grouped notification involving BBC News emerged, a spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple "to raise this concern and fix the problem". [...] The BBC has not yet confirmed if Apple has responded to its complaint.

In which the BBC is unsure of what's going on in the BBC (this is entirely _correct_; BBC News shouldn't get any more access to BBC writ large than any other news agency. But it's quite _funny_.)

adrianomartins 3 months ago

I find it a bit misleading that there isn’t a single mention that the feature is currently in beta.

I’m not saying publishers can get away with anything with a simply “beta” label, but it’s an important fact to mention if you’re going to release a whole piece about this…

  • Schiendelman 3 months ago

    I'm not sure why you find it misleading, it says it's a beta repeatedly, both on the Settings page, on the logo, and during the opt in enablement process.

  • rsynnott 3 months ago

    Honestly, if you're providing it (I believe by default in territories where it's enabled?) to everyone, then 'beta' is purely a marketing term and should carry no weight at all.

joegibbs 3 months ago

One false headline on one small part of the features and they want Apple to scrap the entire thing. Did people want IM to be scrapped the first time someone planned a crime on it?

  • rsynnott 3 months ago

    This is an example of the fundamental underlying problem with anything LLM-based, though; the output is completely un-trustable. This _particular_ example, while likely shocking for, say, Luigi's granny, is not broadly dangerous, but it's very easy to imagine mistakes of similar form causing widespread panic.

    I think the other example:

    > On 21 November, three articles from the New York Times were grouped together in one notification - with one part reading "Netanyahu arrested", referring to the Israeli prime minister.

    is actually a little more alarming. What if it read, say, "Trump arrested"? It is not hard to imagine that causing, ah, trouble; see Jan 6th 2021.

    This feature seems obviously ill-conceived and should be switched off, at least by default, until they can guarantee it works properly (hint: as it's LLM-driven the answer is 'never').

  • 1oooqooq 3 months ago

    did anyone ever advertised IM as a stop all crime solution?