Apple Intelligence Summaries Are a Mess

Jason Snell over at Six Colors takes Apple to task over the current state of their Apple Intelligence notification summaries. He’s 100% right. They are bad, especially when summarizing news, and that’s unacceptable even with the “beta” tag.

Take a look at his included example:

A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.

We need to stop treating terrible AI summaries as your old angry uncle who is always raging about something that isn’t even happening (frankly we should stop placating him too). This is unacceptable and if you’re shipping, it’s on you as the developer.

Full stop.