iOS 18.3 Temporarily Removes Notification Summaries for News

[brunerd]

A possible AI Summary for this article:
Apple kills entire Apple Intelligence Notification Summary Team

 

[brofkand]

Apple Intelligence is an embarrassment

 

[szw-mapple fan]

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.

To be fair, it has probably summarized hundreds of thousands of headlines without issues since launch but the inaccurate ones will of course get highlighted (as they should be). It’s possible that Apple thought that the mistakes would be rare enough to be forgiven by users and news agencies.

 

[ProbablyDylan]

Seemed silly to summarize things like news headlines and email subject lines - things that are already, essentially, summaries.

 

[iPhoneFan5349]

AI is a mess

This is what apple wanted by naming it like this lol. Now you don’t know if you are talking about AI or the horrible product called Apple Intelligence

 

[szw-mapple fan]

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

It seems to me that part of the issue is that the summaries for news and communication is that it had to fit in two lines. Depending on the language (e.g. English vs Chinese) it can really limit how much can fit in that space while still remaining accurate and readable.

I think this feature has a place for the more utilitarian notifications and ads for things like productivity, ride share, and shopping/delivery notifications etc. I don’t want to read 8 notifications about how many stops my Amazon packages are taking or if a refund is issued, but I’d still like to have some notice.

 

[fatTribble]

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.

There will always be a possibility for errors just as if a human were to write the summary.
Just read the original notification.

 

[contacos]

It seems to me that part of the issue is that the summaries for news and communication is that it had to fit in two lines. Depending on the language (e.g. English vs Chinese) it can really limit how much can fit in that space while still remaining accurate and readable.

I think this feature has a place for the more utilitarian notifications and ads for things like productivity, ride share, and shopping/delivery notifications etc. I don’t want to read 8 notifications about how many stops my Amazon packages are taking or if a refund is issued, but I’d still like to have some notice.

Now that would be something useful I could live with. Imagine getting delivery updates on your lock screen, AI could be smart enough to only show you the latest cuz why read "your pizza is here in 20 minutes" when the latest is "your delivery is almost here!". Unfortunately this use case does not seem to be covered

 

[I7guy]

Until we have a solid back-end in terms of Artificial Intelligence, all that depends on it will keep crumbling.

 

[rizzo41999]

Enormous liability risk. Never should have been rolled out with News in the initial rollout.

 

[aParkerMusic]

I get it, but isn’t all of Apple intelligence in beta? Maybe that needs to be advertised better, but if your using it, you should know that it’s still a work in progress.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Now that would be something useful I could live with. Imagine getting delivery updates on your lock screen, AI could be smart enough to only show you the latest cuz why read "your pizza is here in 20 minutes" when the latest is "your delivery is almost here!". Unfortunately this use case does not seem to be covered

It actually works pretty well for me with this use case. When I use a grocery delivery app it will send me multiple notifications about when the shopper starts shopping, what’s out of stock, when it’s out for delivery etc. The notification summary will do something like “Shopper finished shopping with item X out of stock. Delivery in 20 mins”. Honestly very handy and one of the few truly useful improvements to notifications that this feature has had.

 

[Razorpit]

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

Don't forget most of those human's incorrectly summarized the news themselves. 😄

 

[jonnyb098]

Apple thinks everyone’s an idiot. Siri has gotten worse and worse over time so they figured …oh let’s rebrand this and add a bunch of gimmicky AI garbage that barely works…that’ll sell phones. 😂🤣

There should be a class action over the iPhone 16 marketing

 

[flybass]

Hmm, how can we summarize a news article? Headlines are provided and have been doing this just fine for ages.

 

[cicalinarrot]

"iOS 18.3 Temporarily Removes Notification Summaries for News"

Or, as my iPhone notified me the same article, "Elton John runs 100 meters in under 9 seconds ".

 

[-Ryan-]

None of the AI summaries I get for any apps are accurate or useful.

 

[2540497]

In other news I disabled Apple Intelligence altogether. I see no value in it and would rather whatever micro mini gains I get back in battery life to be honest! I use the ChatGPT app because it's easier, faster and more reliable (without the cautious overlay they apply) than Apple's version.

I might turn it back on in the future, if it improves significantly. Most likely iOS 19 or even 20.

 

[sdf]

summarization is a process that by definition reduces the length of text. AI summarization of notifications across multiple notifications is always going to produce absurd results. This whole feature started a bad idea and remains so.

 

[zubikov]

Apple has run out of rabbits to pull out of hats, haven’t they?

Oh look, a slightly faster M5 and 10% price hikes on services. How about another $1-2 trillion in market cap?! Don’t worry about the vision pro and AI stuff, it’s just early.🤦‍♂️

 

[chown33]

I'd like to be able to choose the font and styling for all AI summaries.

I'd probably pick a ransom-note font.

Or something that looks like crayon.

 

[citysnaps]

There will always be a possibility for errors just as if a human were to write the summary.
Just read the original notification.

Cracks me up so many are expecting 100.0% perfection 100.0% of the time.

 

[Sippincider]

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.

When did official "beta features" (not just beta updates) become a thing?

 

[Sippincider]

I'd like to be able to choose the font and styling for all AI summaries.

Comic Sans finally found its home.

 

[klasma]

This won’t help fix stuff like:

AI is lacking awareness of what’s realistic and likely, and also can’t tell when it just doesn’t have enough information.