Apple has paused its Apple Intelligence notification summaries feature for certain apps following criticism over inaccuracies in news headline summaries.
The AI tool recently misinterpreted a notification from The Washington Post, leading to dissatisfaction among users and publishers. Last month, the BBC reported that iOS 18 inaccurately summarized one of its news articles. Consequently, Apple has temporarily deactivated the feature to resolve these issues before reintroducing it to the public.
The notification summaries feature, launched with the iOS 18.1 update, aims to help users quickly understand information from different notifications. The opt-in feature lets users choose which app notifications they wish to summarise.
However, since its launch, the feature has incorrectly summarized notifications from news apps, prompting concerns. In December 2024, the BBC contacted Apple after the AI added false information to summaries, including a serious error involving a fabricated claim about Luigi Mangione’s suicide after his conviction for the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.
Another instance saw a Bluesky user highlight a summary that mistakenly reported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest. In contrast, the original notification only mentioned an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
Despite these issues, Apple initially did not withdraw the feature or issue a correction. The latest error occurred this Wednesday when the feature wrongly summarized a notification from The Washington Post.
In response, the publication’s technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler commented, “These mangled summaries were amusing on low-stakes text messages, but more dangerous on alerts from news apps. It once inaccurately alerted me that Donald Trump had endorsed Tim Walz for president.”
The challenge extends beyond displaying incorrect summaries, as Apple does not indicate when AI generates a notification summary besides a small icon.
According to 9to5Mac, with iOS 18.3, notification summaries will be emphasized by displaying the text in italics, and AI summaries for news and entertainment apps will be disabled by default. Furthermore, users can disable notification summaries for any app directly from the lock screen or notification centre as of iOS 18.3 beta 3. Apple has also updated the Settings app to caution users that summaries “may contain errors.”
9to5Mac also reports that Apple plans to enhance the feature and, in a future software update, enable notification summaries for the currently disabled app categories.
