AI summaries reactivated: More strange news snippets from Apple
Following criticism from major news media, Apple had turned off its AI summaries for their notifications. Now they are back. But are they better?
Example of a news summary in iOS 26: From funny to confusing – but also dangerous?
(Image: Screenshot via 9to5Mac)
With iOS 26 Developer Beta 4 (or Public Beta 1), Apple has reactivated a controversial Apple Intelligence function. The so-called Notification Summaries, which are supposed to summarize content from notifications using artificial intelligence and Apple's in-house language model, had caused misrepresentations and some laughter after their release when they were based on messages from news apps. The iPhone company therefore decided to switch off the function for now. Since then, notifications from the “News” and “Entertainment” sections have no longer been generated. This will remain the case for normal users until September: Only iOS 26 will enable the function again. However, beta testers report that Apple can only solve the problem semi-well.
User decision on what is summarized AI-fied
For the first time, users will be able to decide for themselves whether AI summaries should appear for certain app categories or not. Apple divides this into three categories: “News & Entertainment” (news and entertainment), “Communication & Social” (communication and social media), and “All Other Apps” (all other apps). In addition, as soon as a summary has appeared, it should be possible to turn it off again via a prompt for individual apps. Whether this only works for news apps or for all apps remained unclear at first.
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However, various examples circulating on the web, including on the Apple blog 9to5Mac, show that the AI Summaries are still not perfect and are likely to continue to be a source of laughter. Five news items from Apple's in-house News app, for example, were summarized with the words “Cannabis smells everywhere; Ozzy Osbourne's influence on heavy metal; smell and age intelligence”. While all the points here are true, they don't really make sense.
Apple has too little data
The basic problem remains that Apple only has a very small amount of data: an already short notification becomes an even shorter one. The issue could only be solved if Apple Intelligence could access the individual apps to obtain more details – or click on the links contained therein.
However, neither of these is currently planned and would be technically difficult to implement if Apple wants to maintain its focus on data protection with AI. At least Apple is labeling summaries a little better. But the basic rule is: even now, you should not rely on them. The BBC even asked Apple to stop reactivating them to prevent the spread of fake news.
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