A Blog Post Laments the Widening and Grade Separation of Technology at Its Intersection With Liberal Arts ⇥ isfeeling.social

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

With the third beta of iOS 18.1, Apple has introduced new Apple Intelligence features for notifications. The notification summarization option that was previously available for the Mail and Messages apps now works with all of your apps.

Matt Birchler posted a video of the screen advertising this feature, showing how the “crazy ones” script could be summarized:

Woof, come up with a better example for this during iOS 18.1 startup, Apple. Sucking all the life out of the “here’s to the crazy ones” piece is a bad look.

Not the worst crime of all time or anything, but not great for those who are upset about AI feature sucking the humanity out of art.

Aside from the gall of simplifying an iconic ad campaign to a single-sentence description, this screen barely makes sense. I am guessing few people receive poems or creative writing in an application’s notifications. Those who do would probably prefer it not be summarized. Surely the whole point of a feature like this is to remove the corporate mumbo jumbo from an executive’s email, or to condense a set of alerts from the same app into a single notification.

Sometimes, it is worth taking a second to think about how things look. Part of what makes new technologies special is how they enable human creativity and expression. Not every new invention will be to that end, but surely technology should not be treated as a goal unto itself. If the showcase use of A.I. summarization is to strip a poem — albeit one written for an ad — down to its literal message, what are we even trying to do here?