Tomorrow's Business Today
Apple gets bitten – shrugs, carries on
Tennis star Rafael Nadal has come out as gay. Luke Littler won the World Darts Championship before the match had begun.
The man accused of murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO has shot himself.
Wait. None of these things is true, but if you get news alerts on iPhones from Apple, that’s what you got told.
These alerts are supposedly based on BBC coverage but the Beeb doesn’t make these sorts of mistakes.
It employs a bunch of people to check things first – what are they called now? Oh yes, journalists.
Apple employs robots that it presumably assumes will make nearly all hacks redundant at some point, once they have had enough practice.
Two things here. The first is how casual Apple appears about all of this. An actual news organisation would be mortified to have made these errors.
Rafael Nadal can look after himself of course, but what happens when the tech giants get into local news and wrongly report, say, the death of a school girl.
Or get the details of the girl’s life wrong. I did that once.
She played the clarinet, not the oboe. The parents, as if they weren’t already in hell, wanted to know why I couldn’t be bothered to get it right.
I’ll never forget that mistake. Apple and its robots appear not to care. If they learn, it is not with any sense of humility.
The closest Apple gets to an apology goes like this:
“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback.”
“A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarisation provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.”
In other words, if we make a mistake, it is up to you to tell us. Which is astonishingly arrogant and entirely typical of big tech.
The second point here is that too much of the PR trade sees AI as a handy tool and a neat shortcut, rather than a risk to integrity and much else.
Why bother with journalists and their tedious obsession with whether things are true or not, if you can get your press release into the public domain without them?
Apple would say that in the end all this will work out. How much pain gets caused along the way is not its concern.
Please send candidates for press release of the day to: Simon.english@roxhillmedia.com
Press release of the day
The average price of a used car in December was £16,649, down a little, says this from the Auto Trader Retail Price Index.
Electric vehicles are still the fastest selling cars. There’s loads of other good trade data for the car centric.
“More one-to three-year old cars are now being stocked by retailers as we come out of the pandemic, providing many with a good opportunity to get their hands on the latest vehicles compared to a year ago,” it says.
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