Apple reportedly weakened its Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries feature for some apps after facing a rebound in opposition summary of news headlines. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools recently summarized the Washington Post news notification inaccurately, obtaining FLAK from users and news publications. Last month, the BBC claimed that iOS 18 produced incorrect summary of its news articles. The company is said to have temporarily disabled the feature, intending to resolve the issue before reposting it to the public.
iOS 18.3 Disable the notification summary feature of news, entertainment apps
With the iOS 18.1 update, the tech giant has introduced several Apple Intelligence features to qualified iPhone models. One of them is the notification summary function, which condenses notification information and allows users to quickly scan through key details. This is an opt-in feature that also allows users to choose which apps will be aggregated notifications.
Since its release, AI features have been discovered, producing a false notification summary from the news app. In December 2024, the BBC contacted Apple for false information added to the AI summary. It was reportedly done after Apple intelligence agencies erroneously claimed that the murder of UnitedHealthCare CEO Luigi Mangione committed suicide.
A blues user also shared a screenshot of the AI tool summarizing the New York Times story and misrepresented that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was arrested, when the initial news notice stated that the International Criminal Court He was arrested by him.
Despite these issues, Apple has not tried to undo the feature or release a solution. The feature misrepresented the Washington Post push notification Wednesday, a bug in the latest report.
In response, Geoffrey Fowler, a technical columnist for the publication, wrote: “These messy summaries are fun on low-risk text messages, but more dangerous in the alerts of the news app. Once, it Wrongly warn me that Donald Trump recognized Tim Walz as president.”
While displaying errors and error summaries to users is a big problem in itself, the way Apple actually displays AI summaries also complicates the problem. Currently, the AI-generated notification summary does not clearly indicate when AI will be used to summarize notifications, except for small icons.
According to 9TO5MAC, iOS 18.3 notification summary will display the summary text in italics. Meanwhile, AI summary of apps in the news and entertainment categories will be disabled by default and updated with iOS 18.3.
Users can also close the app’s notification summary from the lock screen or iOS 18.3 beta 3’s notification center, where Apple warns users to aggregate “may contain errors” in the Settings app
The publication also notes that Apple will improve the feature and enable notification summary for the category of disability apps with upcoming software updates.
