Apple’s notification summaries were so bad that they just turned them off

Apple is making changes to its AI-powered notification summaries after complaints. In a new beta of iOS 18, the company has turned off news app summaries entirely, and will use italics to better distinguish summaries from native notifications. 9to5Mac I reported earlier about the changes.

Changes are yet to come BBC He repeatedly wrote stories highlighting how the new AI summaries were hallucinations and created incorrect summaries from his app, and he once wrote a synopsis that Luigi Mangione, the alleged UnitedHealthcare shooter, had shot himself when he didn’t.

Notification Summaries is a feature released by Apple as part of Apple Intelligence, a set of new features powered by artificial intelligence. The premise of notification summaries is to combat the fatigue of apps that may send too many notifications by condensing them into a single alert containing relevant details. Unfortunately, anyone who has used AI chatbots will know this Keep getting things wrong oftenEven when the summaries are not technically wrong, they are vague, stripping away so much context that they are not at all intelligible. It defeats the purpose if you can’t trust Apple’s summaries and have to expand the full list of notifications anyway. For an organization like BBCnot having control over how iOS rewrites its content is just a nightmare that could hurt its credibility with the public — especially with boomers who might read an incorrect synopsis and not know it’s Apple’s fault.

Apple took some time to respond BBC Complaints, finally saying he would Make changes So users can better understand notification summaries. Apparently, it also decided that the technology wasn’t good enough yet to use with apps like newsreaders, so it turned it off for the entire news and entertainment app category. For other categories of apps like Messages, Apple’s AI will now write summaries in italics to indicate the difference more clearly. When users enable Notification Summaries for the first time, iOS will now display a version to let users know that the version remains a beta product.

It was pretty much Apple Intelligence Disappointing Since its launch last year amid much fanfare from executives. Simple features like integration with ChatGPT, and a feature that lets users recognize objects using their camera (something Google Lens has been doing for years), don’t offer much value, and Apple Intelligence isn’t even available in China due to the censorship regime. there. The company plans to launch more features this year, including the ability to interact deeply with applications on the phone using voice commands. But the fact that it cannot get basic summaries right does not inspire confidence. Maybe work on the basics first? Well, Apple needs to sell more iPhones, and AI is all the rage these days, so this is what we get. Incomplete services that are always in the “beta” stage and cause more hassle than they’re worth.