Following major criticism from major media outlets, Apple is making changes to how its AI-powered notifications summaries work with iOS 18.3 beta 3.
The newest iOS 18.3 beta disables notification summaries for apps in the news and entertainment categories. It also makes several other changes to highlight the feature being in beta and potentially generating summaries with errors.
iOS 18.3 makes subtle but important tweaks to AI notifications summaries
In late December, international journalism organization Reporters Without Borders called on Apple to drop AI news summaries. This decision followed a BBC complaint regarding Apple Intelligence producing highly inaccurate news summaries. Apple’s AI generated a false headline from BBC News saying murder suspect Luigi Mangione shot himself, even though this was not the case. Numerous reports soon emerged about Apple Intelligence generating inaccurate summaries of important news on multiple occasions.
Following the criticism, Apple issued a statement saying it would update notification summaries to highlight when they are generated using Apple Intelligence.
In the iOS 18.3 beta 3, Apple rolled out several changes to notification summaries to beta testers. Firstly, it disabled notification summaries for the news and entertainment apps. Apple says it will reintroduce AI-generated summaries for these notification categories in a future update.
You can now easily turn off AI-generated summaries
Secondly, enabling notification summaries from the Settings app will display a message that the feature is in beta and that the generated summaries “may contain errors.”
Third, you can now turn off notification summaries for an app directly from your iPhone’s Lock Screen. To do so, swipe left on the generated summary, select Options, and then Turn Off Summaries. Lastly, notification summaries on the Lock Screen now use italicized text. This way, AI-generated notifications will stand out from regular ones, making it easy for you to identify them.
iOS 18.3 should roll out to the public later this month or in early February.
