What’s changing: Apple is temporarily disabling and modifying its AI-powered notification summary feature in iOS 18.3 due to issues with inaccurate news headlines and summaries.
- The update is expected to release publicly in late January 2025, likely on the 27th or 28th
- The feature initially launched in October as part of Apple Intelligence, designed to prioritize urgent notifications while summarizing less important ones
- Problems emerged in December and January when the system produced incorrect news headlines, including errors in coverage about Rafael Nadal
Technical modifications: Apple is implementing several changes to improve transparency and user control over the notification summary system.
- New options allow users to disable summaries for specific apps directly from the notification screen
- AI-generated text will now appear in italics to clearly identify automated content
- Language warnings will indicate the feature’s experimental status
- Certain apps, particularly news and entertainment services, will temporarily lose summary functionality
Affected applications: The temporary suspension impacts a specific set of apps while Apple works to resolve the accuracy issues.
- Major affected platforms include News, Music, YouTube, Reddit, and popular streaming services like Netflix, Max, and Disney+
- Users can verify which apps are affected by checking Settings — Notifications — Summarize Notifications, where temporarily disabled apps will be clearly marked
Looking ahead: The future viability of Apple’s notification summary feature hinges on the company’s ability to improve its AI model’s accuracy in content summarization, with one potential solution being the direct use of original source headlines rather than AI-generated ones.
Apple temporarily limits notification summaries in iOS 18.3 update