Apple Says It Will More Clearly Label A.I.-generated Summaries ⇥ bbc.com
Zoe Kleinman, Liv McMahon, and Natalie Sherman, BBC News:
“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that receiving the summaries is optional.
“A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.”
I object to the “beta” excuse. Would Apple not be “continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback” if it was not a “beta” product? Of course it would make changes.
Jason Snell, Six Colors:
We shouldn’t be. 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.
The Apple Intelligence vs BBC story is a microcosm of the developer story for the feature. We’re soon expected to vend up all the actions and intents in our apps to Siri, with no knowledge of the context (or accuracy) in which it will be presented to the user. Apple gets to launder the features and content of your apps and wrap it up in their UI as ‘Siri’ — that’s the developer proposition Apple has presented us. They get to market it as Apple Intelligence, you get the blame if it goes awry.
I agree with Jason. I’ll maybe go further—If Apple Intelligence summarizes your notifications then Apple *should* badge it with *their* Apple logo. Not some weird cog or brain or some other such icon. Put your name on it! […]
I agree. Apple should not be putting its name or logo on something it does not stand behind, and it should stand behind everything it ships. It supposedly cannot “ship junk”, but it is obviously not yet proud of the way these notifications were summarized — it is making changes, after all. But will it be courageous enough to attach its valuable brand to the output of its own large language model? I would bet against it, but it should.