Apple Lost the Plot on Texting
NEWS | 19 December 2024
For a brief moment earlier this month, I thought an old acquaintance had passed away. I was still groggy one morning when I checked my phone to find a notification delivering the news. “Obituary shared,” the message bluntly said, followed by his name. But when I opened my phone, I learned that he was very much still alive. Apple’s latest software update was to blame: A new feature that uses AI to summarize iPhone notifications had distorted the original text message. It wasn’t my acquaintance who had died, but a relative of his. That’s whose obituary I had received. These notification summaries are perhaps the most visible part of Apple Intelligence, the company’s long-awaited suite of AI features, which officially began to roll out last month. (It’s compatible with only certain devices.) We are living in push-notification hell, and Apple Intelligence promises to collapse the incessant stream of notifications into pithy recaps. Instead of setting your iPhone aside while you shower and returning to nine texts, four emails, and two calendar alerts, you can now return to a few brief Apple Intelligence summaries. The trouble is that Apple Intelligence doesn’t seem to be very … intelligent. Ominous summaries of people’s Ring-doorbell alerts have gone viral: “Multiple people at your Front Yard,” the feature notified one user. “Package is 8 stops away, delivered, and will be delivered tomorrow,” an Amazon alert confusingly explained. And sliding into someone’s DMs hits different when Instagram notifications are summarized as “Multiple likes and flirtatious comments.” But Apple Intelligence appears to especially struggle with text messages. Sometimes the text summaries are alarmingly inaccurate, as with the false obituary I received. But even when they are technically right, the AI summaries still feel wrong. “Expresses love and encouragement,” one AI notification I recently received crudely announced, compressing a thoughtfully written paragraph from a loved one. What’s the point of a notification like that? Texting—whether on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal—is a deeply intimate medium, infused with personality and character. By strip-mining messages into bland, lifeless summaries, Apple seems to be misunderstanding what makes texting so special in the first place. Perhaps it was inevitable that AI summaries would come for push notifications. Summarization is AI’s killer feature and tech companies seem intent on applying it to just about everything. The list of things that AI is summarizing might require a summary of its own: emails and Zoom calls and Facebook comments and YouTube videos and Amazon reviews and podcasts and books and medical records and full seasons of TV shows. In many cases, this summarization is helpful—for instance, in streamlining meeting notes. But where is the line? Concision, when applied to already concise texts, sucks away what little context there was to begin with. In some cases, the end result is harmful. The technology seems to have something of a death problem. Across multiple cases, the feature appears bewilderingly eager to falsely suggest that people are dead. In one case, a user reported that a text from his mother reading “That hike almost killed me!” had been turned into “Attempted suicide, but recovered.” But mostly, AI summaries lead to silly outcomes. “Inflatable costumes and animatronic zombies overwhelming; will address questions later,” read the AI summary of a colleague’s message on Halloween. Texts rich with emotional content read like a lazy therapist’s patient files. “Expressing sadness and worry,” one recent summary said. “Upset about something,” declared another. AI is unsurprisingly awful with breakup texts (“No longer in relationship; wants belongings from the apartment”). When it comes to punctuation, the summaries read like they were written by a high schooler who just discovered semicolons and now overzealously inserts; them; literally; everywhere. Even Apple admits that the language used in notification summaries can be clinical. The technology is at its absolute worst when it tries to summarize group chats. It’s one thing to condense three or four messages from a single friend; it’s another to reduce an extended series of texts from multiple people into a one-sentence notification. “Rude comments exchanged,” read the summary of one user’s family group chat. When my friends and I were planning a dinner earlier this month, my phone collapsed a series of messages coordinating our meal into “Takeout, ramen, at 6:30pm preferred.” Informative, I guess, but the typical back-and-forth of where to eat (one friend had suggested sushi) and timing (the other was aiming for an early night) was erased. Beyond the content, much of the delight of text messaging comes from the distinctiveness of the individual voices of the people we are talking to. Some ppl txt like dis. others text in all lowercase and no punctuation. There are lol friends and LOL friends. My dad is infamous for sending essay-length messages. When I text a friend who lives across the country asking about her recent date, I am not looking purely for informational content (“Night considered good,” as Apple might summarize); rather, I want to hear the date described in her voice (“Was amaze so fun we had lovely time”). As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle has written, “When we are in human conversation, we often care less about the information an utterance transfers than its tone and emotional intent.” When texts are fed through the AI-summarization machine, each distinct voice is bludgeoned into monotony. For a company that prides itself on perfection, the failures of Apple’s notification summaries feel distinctly un-Apple. Since ChatGPT’s release, as technology companies have raced to position themselves as players in the AI arms race, the company has remained notably quiet. It’s hard not to wonder if Apple, after falling behind, is now playing catch-up. Still, the notification summaries will likely improve. For now, users have to opt in to the AI-summary feature (it’s still in beta), and Apple has said that it will continue to polish the notifications based on user feedback. The feature is already spreading. Samsung is reportedly working on integrating similar notification summaries for its Galaxy phones. With the social internet in crisis, text messages—and especially group chats—have filled a crucial void. In a sense, texting is the purest form of a social network, a rare oasis of genuine online connection. Unlike platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where algorithmic feeds warp how we communicate, basic messaging apps offer a more unfiltered way to hang out digitally. But with the introduction of notification summaries that strive to optimize our messages for maximum efficiency, the walls are slowly crumbling. Soon, the algorithmic takeover may be complete.
Author: Matteo Wong. Lila Shroff. Jonathan L. Zittrain.
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