I’ve been using Apple Intelligence on my iPhone 16 Pro Max for nearly a week now and overall it's been a great experience. From Writing Tools that help you to quickly format text (creating tables is seriously useful), to Clean Up, which removes unwanted objects from photos, Apple Intelligence truly feels like the next generation of iOS, and that’s exciting.
I do have one issue with the iOS 18.1 public beta, however, and while the feature in question is a pain, it points towards a bigger issue that seriously needs addressing before the official launch in October.
So what exactly is getting on my nerves? Well, Apple Intelligence loves summaries, and most of the time they're actually pretty good. Having Apple Intelligence summarize an article, for example, is a great way to see if you want to read the whole thing before committing to it. It's also handy for emails, where you often want to get to the core of the information quickly, condensing the subject into a single line so you know if you should click in or not.
When it comes to summarizing any form of instant messaging, however, it’s one of the weirdest and most dystopian things I’ve ever encountered on an iPhone. Seeing Apple Intelligence streamline my friends and family members’ messages into single lines of text that have a robotic tone freaks me out a little, especially considering that seven out of 10 times it gets the point of the messages completely wrong.
Essentially, Apple Intelligence reads multiple messages for you and summarizes them into a single notification on your lock screen. From there you can get a glance at a message’s contents without opening the chat and reading a wall of text. It’s an intriguing concept that if done right could be brilliant, but in its current state it just feels like cheap generative AI taking over your friends’ personalities.
Notification summaries for messages often can’t understand the difference between a statement and a question, leading to confusing notifications on my Lock Screen. In that sense, it misses the mark in what it’s trying to achieve by not even making your life easier, instead forcing you to click notifications to read the original messages to get the gist of things. Everyone has their own way of writing, and Apple Intelligence’s inability to perceive and adapt the summaries to tone of voice makes me feel uneasy whenever I get multiple messages in from someone I know very well, like my girlfriend.
Thankfully you can turn the feature off – more on that below, but for me its existence poses a bigger question, and one which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently as more iPhone owners than ever finally get to use on-device AI: will we all just start sounding the same? Will everyone start using Writing Tools to tell their loved ones how much they mean to them? Will communication evolve to a point where it's just two people sending Smart Replies to each other? I digress, but you get the idea: Apple Intelligence, and more specifically these notification summaries, are creeping me out.
Please make this easier, Apple
While you can turn these summaries off, how you do this is not immediately obvious. The only option under the Apple Intelligence settings is one for turning Apple Intelligence on or off entirely. Instead you need to go into Notifications settings, where you can switch off notification summaries.
This opens up a different discussion: why are Apple Intelligence settings so hard to find and why can’t Apple just list all features inside the Apple Intelligence settings panel for users to decide themselves? There should be a list of all of Apple Intelligence’s AI-powered tools in one settings panel. so you can just toggle off whatever you want to use. Many users who get their hands on Apple Intelligence for the first time next month will have issues finding where to turn off and tweak each feature, but it shouldn’t be this hard – just put them under Apple Intelligence settings.
In this instance, I’m not against notification summaries; I’m against notification summaries in their current form. So while at some point I’ll probably use Apple Intelligence to condense my pings, at the moment I just want to turn them off.
Now that I know I can turn them off by finding the settings nestled into iOS, I’ve decided to opt out of being Apple Intelligence’s test rat when it comes to my day-to-day interactions. If, however, Apple’s AI starts to learn from tone of voice and understand sarcasm a bit better then I’ll be open to trying it out again.
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