Apple Intelligence News Summaries Are Back in the Fourth Beta Builds of Apple’s ’26 Operating Systems ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

Upon installing the new update, users of Apple Intelligence-compatible devices will be asked to enable or disable three broad categories of notifications: those for “News & Entertainment” apps, for “Communication & Social” apps, and for all other apps. The operating systems will list sample apps based on what you currently have installed on your device.

All Apple Intelligence notification summaries continue to be listed as “beta,” but Apple’s main change here is a big red disclaimer when you enable News & Entertainment notification summaries, pointing out that “summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines.” The notifications also get a special “summarized by Apple Intelligence” caption to further distinguish them from regular, unadulterated notifications.

Apparently there are architectural changes to help with reliability, but the only way to know for certain if a generated summary is accurate is to read the original. Then again, there are plenty of cases where human-written headlines are contradicted by the story contained within. These are different — at least they feel different to me — and it is difficult to articulate why. The best way I can describe it is that it is an interference layer between the source of data and its recipient. This is true for all machine-generated summaries which promise a glimpse of a much larger set of information, but without any accountability for their veracity. While summaries of message threads in Mail are often usable, I have rarely found them useful.