Veteran tech writer Jason Snell thinks Apple’s plan to address the Apple Intelligence summaries mess doesn’t go far enough, and has three suggestions for the company.
The post follows a series of embarrassing mistakes in attempted summaries of news stories, which have variously claimed that Luigi Mangione shot himself, announced the winner of a competition which hadn’t even taken place, and reported the non-existent coming out of a tennis player …
The Apple Intelligence summaries mess
Apple’s new feature made headlines for its own inability to parse headlines a month ago.
The BBC isn’t pleased with Apple Intelligence’s notification summary feature. The corporation says that the notification summary feature “generated a false headline” about Lugi Mangione, who was arrested this week as the suspected killer of the United HealthGroup CEO. The notification summary in question falsely suggested that Mangione had shot himself.
Further examples followed.
A news summary from Apple falsely claimed darts player Luke Littler won the PDC World Championship – before he has even played in the final. The incorrect summary was written by artificial intelligence (AI) and is based on a BBC story about Littler winning the tournament semi-final on Thursday night.
Within hours, another AI notification summary falsely told some BBC Sport app users that tennis great Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.
Apple initially kept quiet, before later emphasizing that it’s a beta feature, and promising to better label AI-generated summaries.
Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback. A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence.
Snell’s three suggestions
Snell says Apple’s proposed approach doesn’t go nearly far enough – and the beta excuse doesn’t wash.
It’s hard to accept “it’s in beta” as an excuse when the features have shipped in non-beta software releases that are heavily marketed to the public as selling points of Apple’s latest hardware […] Apple’s shipping a feature that frequently rewrites headlines to be wrong. That’s a failure, and it shouldn’t be shrugged off as being the nature of OS features in the 2020s.
First up, says Snell, Apple should allow developers the ability to opt-out of their apps being included in AI summaries.
Second, the summaries should have different approaches depending on the context.
It should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized.
Finally, to avoid the problem of Apple attempting to summarize already-summarized content, AI should base its summary on the text of the news piece, not just the headline.
9to5Mac’s Take
This is a good take. In particular, giving app developers an opt-out would be a win-win. It would mean that organizations like the BBC could simply say ‘Nope, we don’t want to be an unwilling participant in your beta, thanks.’ And because developers could do this, it would provide something close to a get out of jail free card for Apple, as it can point out that it’s up to developers whether or not they want to run these kind of risks.
Image: 9to5Mac composite of images from the BBC and Steven Van Elk on Unsplash
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