iOS 18.3 Temporarily Removes Notification Summaries for News

[MacRumors]

With the iOS 18.3 update, Apple made several changes to the Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries feature that aggregates incoming notifications into a single quick-access message.

For now, Notification Summaries for the News and Entertainment category have been temporarily disabled, and Apple is working on improvements. Notification Summaries for news will return in a future software update.

In the Settings app, when a user activates Notification Summaries, Apple has added a warning that this is a beta feature and that there could be errors.

For summaries that are still available through Apple Intelligence, the text is now italicized as a way to distinguish them from traditional notifications.

There is also now an option to manage whether notifications are summarized for an app right from the Lock Screen. To turn off summaries from the Lock Screen, swipe to the left on a Notification Summary and then tap on options to get to the menu to disable it on a per-app basis.

Apple is making changes to Notification Summaries following complaints that the way Apple Intelligence aggregated news notifications could lead to false headlines and confused customers. Several BBC notifications, for example, were improperly summarized, providing false information to readers.

After BBC News complained, Apple said that it would update Apple Intelligence to cut down on confusion caused by inaccurate summaries. Apple said that a future software update would clarify when notifications were summarized by Apple Intelligence.

Available on compatible devices in iOS 18.1 and later, ‌Apple Intelligence‌ notification summaries are designed to group multiple notifications from the same app together, providing a one-sentence overview of the content. These short summaries can cause problems when AI pulls the wrong details from news stories.

While summaries have been disabled for news for the time being, the feature is still available for other types of apps. Notification Summaries can be turned off entirely in the Notifications section of the Settings app.

Article Link: iOS 18.3 Temporarily Removes Notification Summaries for News

 

[poematik13]

AI is a mess

 

[ghostface147]

How will I get my laughs now??

 

[cjsuk]

Magic hammer turns out to be made of poo.

(I know that's not a technical argument but I can't be arsed to type out another A4 page of why this will never work)

 

[StuBeck]

This is one of those changes that makes you wonder what sort of testing Apple is doing. It had to have come up before it was publicly released, and apparently hundreds to thousands of people thought they had no issues re-writing news articles headlines while keeping them accurate.

 

[Paddle1]

The small taste of AI in the updated Mail app made it clear to me that there's still work to be done on stuff like this.

 

[carswell]

Apple Intelligence: proudly maintaining the glorious Siri tradition.

 

[FSMBP]

I disabled it for everything...It's summarized iMessages wrong (omitted critical info) and also saved no-time, because I have no faith in it so I ended up reading the messages.

 

[n-evo]

also saved no-time, because I have no faith in it so I ended up reading the messages.

That’s the main issue with this feature.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

I think the feature is pretty useful for batch messages or emails, but It’s not really necessary for news since headlines are already supposed to be human-curated summaries of articles.

 

[goonie4life9]

Not to worry, everyone, for the Apple Support process is in the final stage: Engineering is aware of the issues, keep your device up to date, and no further troubleshooting will be provided! That means an update could happen any day now!

 

[sw1tcher]

For now, Notification Summaries for the News and Entertainment category have been temporarily disabled, and Apple is working on improvements. Notification Summaries for news will return in a future software update.

Apple admitting that this

Apple Intelligence Update Will Add Clarification to Prevent Fake Headline Confusion

Apple is working on an update for Apple Intelligence that will cut down on confusion caused by inaccurate summaries of news headlines, Apple told BBC...

www.macrumors.com

isn't enough.

Wise move.

 

[airwalk331]

AI is a mess

Apple is a mess. Seems like they just threw it in the iPhone pot and that was it. No real QC or smart integration on their part. They simply didn’t complete good work for this “feature”

 

[Porco]

Accurate / Inaccurate.

Here is some news, in summary: be aware your news summary might not be accurate.
Please be aware the previous sentence about your news summary may not be accurate about being accurate, or not.
Anyway, news! Summary! Good times.
Please check back later for more news summaries, unless we disable them, which we will tell you about, accurately.*

*Unless it is inaccurate, obviously.

 

[orbital~debris]

For summaries that are still available through Apple Intelligence, the text is now italicized as a way to distinguish them from traditional notifications.

Instead of italicising the text, which doesn't look great in notifications tbh, why didn't Apple use Apple Intelligence's signature colour-blend/shimmer – either as a notification background, or even for the text itself?

After all, it is how Apple Intelligence's work is indicated in Mail, with priority messages, for example…

 

[orbital~debris]

I think the feature is pretty useful for batch messages or emails, but It’s not really necessary for news since headlines are already supposed to be human-curated summaries of articles.

Indeed. Apple Intelligence either needs to go and read the source article and summarise that (rather than the headline), or it needs to not be applied to notifications coming from apps in the 'News' category.

If it did the former, I could easily see it becoming an 'anti click-bait' tool.

 

[PowerButton]

If you’re going to have summarized news articles I think you have to run it by an actual human.

 

[scrapesleon]

Disabling it for news tells you all you need to know about Siri it will never be fixed

 

[Permanent Sigh]

Well that’s one way to placate the BBC. 😆

I turned those summaries off across the entire OS, they’re too annoying and not useful at all for me.

 

[Aluminum213]

It just works - Apple

 

[contacos]

My take? Lives too long to not be able to read push notifications without a summary.

(For me) it seems to "fix" an issue that does not even need fixing. 70% of App notifications are turned off anyway and for all the others I got time to read a 2 line sentence

 

[JPack]

Disabling it is the improvement. That's courage.

 

[HJM.NL]

They should have warned iOS 18 to iOS 18.2.1 is still beta:

Will iOS 19 be the golden master of iOS 18?

What a mess.

 

[baryon]

I was not expecting anything useful to come of Apple Intelligence and yet I was still disappointed.

 

[magicschoolbus]

The AI bubble has gotten to be enormous. But at least the 60 year old cat enthusiast with no photoshop skills can generate memes. That alone is worth a few trillion dollars.