iPhones, iPads, and Macs with Apple Intelligence now have a unique AI feature that summarizes notifications for you. Starting with iOS/iPadOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1, when multiple notifications pile up for a given app, the little LLM that Apple has built into our content does its best to algorithmically give you a quick overview. (He’s in a group text with a lot of people? He’ll try to tell you what they’re talking about.) Sometimes that’s a good thing. It’s very often funny.

I like how Summaries handle some of my Apple Home notifications, like when I read “The garage has changed status several times; recently closed” instead of a pile of messages on my garage door. The wording changes, but without fail (so far) it has been correct whether the last thing it did was open or close, so I don’t need to open Apple Home or the camera in my garage to check it. (I still do it sometimes because LLMs can be liars.)

The problem arises when it tries to briefly transmit things like text messages, emails, and Slack notifications. They’re generally vaguely average, in the same way as Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel The road is about a father and son who take a walk together. I guess that’s not wrong, but damn, that’s missing the point.

Add the mini-LLM’s problems in grasping appropriate context to the chaos of human communication, and things can get very funny. Here are some examples that I collected online from my colleagues at The edge and from my own phone.

Right after the first beta releases of iOS 18.1, I saw this gem stating: “Apologies for poor communication; busy life; not ready for a relationship.

Frame. It’s bad enough breaking up over text. Is it better to receive the message first from an AI summary? Well, that gets to the point. I’ll give this to him.

If you’re like me, you hate notifications and tend to ignore certain noisy apps. Now imagine waking up at 1 a.m. and unlocking your phone, groggy, only to learn that you’re about to be mobbed John Wick-style by “multiple people” outside your front doors and back and in your driveway.

Just make sure the puppy is safe, I guess.

As a heavy user of Apple Shortcuts, I feel Matthew Cassinelli’s irritation at learning that there are no new features coming — Apple Intelligence just merged two unrelated notifications.

If I hadn’t been accustomed to receiving random emails about screeners, I might have been very confused about the invitation from the Writers Guild of America (of which Vox Media is a part) to review its buttocks. Again, context is very important.

Okay, actually, that’s pretty much exactly what The onionThe title of this email was “very good work”, Apple Intelligence.

This is a very uncomfortable set of things to summarize. (Also, that thing from Microsoft? It’s a gender detection AI tool that 404 Media reported Microsoft had accidentally left it active.)

Which movie is bad? Is that why the button is bad? (Editor’s note: look closely at the first image in this tweet.)

Seriously, why doesn’t he just tell me what the movie is?

Are Apple Intelligence notification summaries a life-changing feature? Haha, no. But I don’t hate them. Notifications are a terrible, constant intrusion that my attention-deficient brain hates anyway; at least the summaries emphasize things from time to time. I think this latest article from Threads sums up my feelings pretty well:

Oh, and here’s one more for the road that happened while we were editing this story: