Apple tweaks AI notification summaries in iOS 18.3 following outcry
It’s fair to say that the Apple Intelligence features released so far have been met with mixed reviews. Among the more contentious features is AI-powered summaries of notifications on the lock screen and notification shade. It’s useful when you have a bunch of notifications from the same app or to quickly give you an idea of what updates to a Messages thread are all about.
But like everything powered by Artificial Intelligence, it can get things wrong. Sometimes, very wrong. When summarizing news alerts, these poor summaries can completely misrepresent the real story, and Apple rightly received some real criticism over it. What’s more, the tiny little icon in the notification is not a clear enough indication that you’re looking at an AI-generated summary.
With iOS 18.3 (starting in beta 3), Apple is introducing several key changes to Apple Intelligence notification summaries that should help address these issues:
- Notification Summaries for apps in the News & Entertainment category will be disabled for now, and re-enabled in a future update when Apple improves the accuracy of the AI summaries.
- When you enable Notification Summaries in settings, it more clearly states that the feature is a beta (as all Apple Intelligence features are) and that summaries “may contain errors.”
- Summarized text is italicized, in addition to the little AI summary icon next to the text. This will further separate them from regular notification text.
- You can disable Notification Summaries for an app right from the lock screen. Swipe left on the notification partway, choose “Options” then “Turn off Summaries.”
These changes are active starting in iOS 18.3 beta 3 and should be present when iOS 18.3 is released widely, likely in late January or early February.
