Apple has reportedly disabled its Apple Intelligence notification summaries feature for some apps after facing backlash over error-laden summaries for news headlines. The artificial intelligence (AI) tool recently summarised a Washington Post news notification inaccurately, garnering flak from users and news publications. Last month, the BBC claimed that iOS 18 generated an incorrect summary of its news article. It is said that the company has temporarily disabled the feature, intending to fix the issues before re-releasing it to the public.
iOS 18.3 Disables Notification Summaries Feature For News, Entertainment Apps
With the iOS 18.1 update, the tech giant rolled out several Apple Intelligence features to eligible iPhone models. One of them was the notification summaries feature, which condenses the information of the notification to let users quickly scan through key details. It is an opt-in feature that also lets users choose which apps’ notifications will be summarised.
Since its release, the AI feature has been spotted generating erroneous summaries of notifications from news apps. In December 2024, the BBC approached Apple about false information being added to AI summaries. This was reportedly done after Apple Intelligence wrongly claimed that Luigi Mangione, who was convicted of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, had committed suicide.
A Bluesky user had also shared a screenshot where the AI tool summarised a New York Times story and falsely stated that Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was arrested, when the original news notification stated that a warrant for his arrest was issued by the International Criminal Court.
Despite these issues, Apple did not make any efforts to pull down the feature or release a fix at the time. The latest reported error was spotted on Wednesday, when the feature incorrectly summarised a push notification from The Washington Post.
In response, the publication’s technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler wrote, “These mangled summaries were amusing on low-stakes text messages, but more dangerous on alerts from news apps. One time it incorrectly alerted me that Donald Trump had endorsed Tim Walz for president.”
While showing false and error-laden summaries to users is a big problem in itself, the issue is also compounded by how Apple actually displays the AI summaries. Currently, the AI-generated notification summaries do not clearly denote when AI is used to summarise a notification, aside from a small icon.
According to 9to5Mac, iOS 18.3 notification summaries will highlight summarised text, by displaying it in italics. Meanwhile, AI summaries for apps in the news and entertainment category will be disabled by default withthe iOS 18.3 update.
Users will also be able to shut off notification summaries for an app from the lock screen or the notification center as of iOS 18.3 beta 3, and Apple warns users that summaries “may contain errors” in the Settings app
The publication also states that Apple will improve the feature and enable notification summaries for the disabled app category with an upcoming software update.
