Your phone buzzes with a news alert. But what if AI wrote it – and it’s not true? | Archie Bland

My first mistake at the Guardian came, agonisingly enough, in my first article as a member of staff, and remains memorialised on the internet to this day. My subject was not a theoretical physician, a note at the end politely explained, but a theoretical physicist. Ten years later, it still makes me shudder.

Still, I felt a little better about it when I saw the run that Apple’s artificial intelligence system went on recently. In its automated summaries of news notifications sent out to some…