Apple’s notification summaries are the worst game of telephone ever

When Apple first rolled out its AI-powered notification summaries as part of iOS 18, I admit I was excited. I tend to disappear in group chats during the day — usually because I’m staying productive — which means I often come back to quite the stack of notifications that I have to read through. So, for my iPhone to sort through the mess and bring back a one-sentence summary sounded like a dream come true. As soon as it launched, I opted in.

And, as it turns out, Apple Intelligence does summarize my notifications — or at least it tries to. By trying to condense possibly dozens of messages into one single sentence, it has to pick and choose what context matters. It’s as if I were playing a game of telephone with friends, only the message I’m waiting for is hundreds of words long. Here’s what’s going wrong and what Apple has promised to do about it.

As I alluded to in my intro, the problem with Apple’s notification summaries is simple: They’re just too simple. Unfortunately, someone somewhere decided everything had to boil down to a single sentence, almost like a TikTok or a tweet (back when character limits existed). And, when attempting to summarize a 45-minute conversation between half a dozen other people, that means letting Apple Intelligence choose what matters.

For example, I’m part of a group chat with several other tech journalists, and we all happened to be in Las Vegas for CES in early January. Of course, we all managed different schedules during our time in Vegas, but we tried to meet up whenever possible to grab lunch or share the location of a coffee shop with fast Wi-Fi — easier said than done. So, whenever I would wrap up a meeting, I’d almost always pull up my iPhone 16 Pro to check what was going on and where everyone was.

More often than not, I’d end up even more confused than when I’d started. Although I might occasionally get a helpful fact, like the location of a booth on the show floor or an interesting event, I often got something completely useless, like the phrase “Analysts are insufferable” or a remark about needing to befriend a new PR representative. Both pieces became part of much funnier conversations later on, but in the moment, I had no idea what I was looking at.

Worse, Apple’s notification summaries aren’t just for personal messages, either — they also try to make sense of Instagram memes and direct messages. For example, a friend and I share a love for all things women’s sports, so I shot her a clip of Trinity Rodman talking about her relationship — or lack thereof — with her father, Dennis Rodman. My friend replied that in that setting, Trinity looked surprisingly like Zendaya (not sure I agreed, but not important). In all of its infinite intelligence, Apple Intelligence summarized the interaction as “Trinity Rodman appeared on podcast; surprised to learn he is Zendaya’s dad.”

I mean, come on, Apple, that’s not even close. I guess it’s somewhat close in the sense that Trinity Rodman did appear on a podcast, and we did talk about Zendaya, but everything else has whisper down the lane written all over it. It wasn’t even trying to summarize too many messages this time, either — our entire one-on-one conversation lasted about five minutes.

Of course, using Apple’s notification summaries for personal text messages isn’t a life or death situation — at least, it isn’t usually. But what happens if it is? The way Apple has its optional summaries set up at the moment is that they’ll work for just about any app on your phone — social media, personal messaging, or otherwise. And yes, that includes the news.

I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want is a summary of the news that misses key pieces of context — the type of thing people read the news for. And this time, it’s not just me complaining about Apple’s struggle to make sense of information. The news errors have been so bad that Apple Intelligence turned the BBC’s report about the murder of the United Healthcare CEO into a summary of how he had shot himself. Not only is it incorrect, but it’s the opposite of the truth. If that type of mix-up were to happen with regard to the wildfires in California, it could put users in danger by suggesting that the fires were headed towards them — or worse, incorrectly telling them they were safe.

Unfortunately, Apple’s tendency to fumble the truth also conflates serious personal situations. My colleagues Rita and Mahmoud were recently discussing the steps required to become an organ donor and how it’s vital to list emergency contact information (just in case). Apple took that information and turned it into a summary about abortion even though the words “abortion” or “scar” were never mentioned. somehow, it still nailed the fact that emergency contact information was part of the discussion. In any situation, bringing up abortion has the potential to be incredibly traumatizing to people, so for Apple to pull it out of the utterly wrong context is even worse.

So, with the knowledge that Apple’s notification summaries struggle with context and often try to compress information just a bit too tightly, you’d expect that it means a solution is on the way, right? After all, when Google’s AI-powered search results told people to mix non-toxic glue in with pizza cheese to give it a better pull, it paused its rollout immediately. Well, it sounds like the answer is a resounding no.

Instead, Apple released a statement to Ars Technica, essentially saying that its summaries are optional and that the original content is still easily accessible. It also promised to make content from Apple Intelligence more clearly identifiable as AI-generated and encouraged users to report if they experienced an unexpected or inaccurate summary. That sounds like Apple saying, “If you don’t like our Apple Intelligence — the thing we’ve centered our new iPhones around — don’t use it.”

And, unfortunately, I guess that’s the only solution that works now. Right now, you can opt in or out of Apple’s notification summaries one app at a time, which means you could keep them for things like Instagram and Messages but shut them off for news services and business apps like Slack. It’s a fancy way of telling users to turn it off, don’t turn it back on again, and it doesn’t leave a great taste in my mouth when it already feels like Apple is far behind the AI eight-ball in most cases.

Going forward, I think I’ll probably keep Apple’s notification summaries active for Messages because I can usually keep up with my conversations, but for everything else, I’ll be sticking with a good, old-fashioned pile of notifications.