Apple’s Notifications Summaries Were So Bad It’s Just Turning Them Off

Apple is making changes to its AI-powered notification summaries following complaints. In a new beta version of iOS 18, the company has completely turned off the summaries for news apps, and it will use italics to better distinguish summaries from the original notifications. 9to5Mac earlier reported on the changes.

The changes come after the BBC repeatedly wrote stories highlighting how the new AI summaries were hallucinating and creating incorrect summaries from its app, one time writing in a summary that Luigi Mangione, the alleged UnitedHealthcare shooter, had shot himself when he had not.

Notification summaries are a feature that Apple has released as part of Apple Intelligence, a suite of new features powered by artificial intelligence. The premise of notification summaries is to combat fatigue from apps that may send many notifications by condensing them down into a single alert with pertinent details. Unfortunately, anyone who has used AI chatbots will know they continue to get things wrong often, and even when the summaries are not technically wrong, they are just inscrutable, stripping out so much context as to not be comprehensible at all. It defeats the purpose if you cannot trust Apple’s summaries and have to expand the full notification list anyway. For an organization like the BBC, having no control over how iOS rewrites its content is just a nightmare that could further hurt its credibility with the public—especially with Boomers who might read an incorrect summary and not know it is Apple’s fault.

Apple took some time to respond to the BBC’s complaints, finally saying that it would make changes so that users better understand notification summaries. Apparently, it also decided the technology just is not good enough yet to be used with apps like news readers, so it is turning them off for the entire News & Entertainment category of apps. For other categories of apps like Messages, Apple’s AI will now write summaries in italics to denote the difference more clearly. When users first enable notification summaries, iOS will now display a copy informing users that the version remains a beta product.

Apple Intelligence has been largely underwhelming since launching last year to much fanfare by executives. Simple features like an integration with ChatGPT, and a feature that lets users identify objects with their camera (something Google Lens has been doing for years), do not provide much value. The company plans more features to come this year, including the ability to interact deeply with apps 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 artificial intelligence is all the rage these days, so this is what we get. Half-baked services that are constantly in “beta” and cause more nuisance than they are worth.