Much of Apple Intelligence is still in beta, but notification summaries have become a hot feature within Apple’s first set of AI-focused features. He has had some errors, most notably in quite incorrectly summarizing a BBC story about Luigi Mangione, who is the accused murderer of United HealthCare chief executive Brian Thompson.
It’s not unusual for AI and these LLMs (large language models) to drive you crazy at times, but this one was particularly notable. This prompted the BBC and other news organizations to ask Apple to fix or remove the feature before future bugs were created. It happened to a few other outlets, including the New York Times, and Apple issued a statement, noting that the feature was in beta and that a software update would “further clarify when the text displayed is a summary provided by Apple Intelligence “.
He also reminded us that Apple Intelligence users can always provide feedback and we’re now seeing some results. In the latest beta builds (developer and public) of iOS 18.3, Apple temporarily disabled notification digests for news and entertainment apps, fixing the criticism completely.
No more fake news
First of all, you can now turn off notification digests on an app-by-app basis, which means you can turn them off for all news apps if you want. This is a welcome addition and in Settings > Notifications > Summarize Notifications it even says: “Summaries may contain errors.”
As you scroll, you’ll see that the News apps, as well as the Entertainment or Streaming apps, may be turned on but labeled “Temporarily unavailable.” This makes it clear that Apple is working behind the scenes to perfect the notification summary process for these and we’ll likely see them return in an upcoming update, probably first in another beta.
Additionally, when you view these notification summaries on the lock screen, the ones that have been summarized will be displayed with italicized text. This should make it easier to see them alongside the usual notifications, and of course you can tap to expand and see the original.
Overall, it’s great to see Apple responding here, and considering this is the latest beta, we’ll likely see these changes in the full 18.3 release as well. Of course, there’s no exact time on when it will arrive, but we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as it arrives.
