It's fair to say that the Apple Intelligence features released so far have received mixed reviews. Among the most controversial features are AI-powered notification summaries on the lock screen and notification shade. This is useful when you receive many notifications from the same app or to quickly give you an idea of what updates are in a thread.
But like everything that relies on artificial intelligence, things can go wrong. Sometimes, very fake. When summarizing news alerts, these poor summaries can completely misrepresent the real story, and Apple has rightly received some real criticism for this. Additionally, the small icon in the notification doesn't make it clear enough that you're viewing an AI-generated summary.
With iOS 18.3 (from Beta 3), Apple is introducing several key changes to Apple Intelligence notification summaries that should help resolve these issues:
- Notification summaries for apps in the News & Entertainment category will be disabled for now and re-enabled in a future update when Apple improves the accuracy of AI summaries.
- When you enable notification summaries in Settings, it makes it clearer that the feature is a beta (as all Apple Intelligence features are) and that the summaries “may contain errors.”
- The summary text is italicized, in addition to the small AI summary icon next to the text. This will further separate them from the usual notification text.
- You can turn off notification summaries for an app directly from the lock screen. Swipe left on the notification halfway through, choose “Options,” then “Turn off summaries.”
These changes are active as of iOS 18.3 beta 3 and should be present when iOS 18.3 is widely released, likely in late January or early February.
