Apple Intelligence: AI notification summaries are a failure, Apple is backtracking

Problems with notification summaries

In December 2024, the feature falsely summarized a BBC news story, sharing that Luigi Mangione had killed himself by shooting himself. A month earlier, it was the New York Times which was the victim of an erroneous Apple Intelligence notification summary, claiming that Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested.

Faced with this situation, the media stepped up to the plate, as did Reporters Without Borders (RSF), emphasizing that generative AI was not yet mature enough to deliver reliable information to the public. The opportunity for the NGO to criticize the European AI Act, which “failed to classify information-generating AI as high-risk systems, leaving a critical legal gap”. Needless to say, it smelled like a scorch for Apple.

The solutions

Good news, the Apple firm has corrected the situation with beta 3 of iOS 18.3. First of all, we learn that Apple Intelligence notification summaries are temporarily disabled for the application category “News and entertainment”.

A radical solution which will allow Apple to avoid being slapped on the wrist again, and to refine its copy to prevent any future errors. “Notification summaries will be re-enabled for this category in an upcoming software update as Apple continues to refine the experience”specifies 9to5Mac.

Apple then made three changes to its notification summaries. The first allows you to deactivate this Apple Intelligence function for an application from the lock screen, as is already the case for traditional notifications.

The second highlights the notifications summarized using text written in italics, which makes them more distinguishable from other alerts received. The third is a simple warning message in the settings, pointing out that these summaries may contain errors.

Please note, all of these changes relate to the latest developer and public betas of iOS 18.3.