Jason Snell: ‘Apple Intelligence Summaries Might Get Warning Labels. That’s Not Enough.’

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

So what can Apple do now? A non-apology and the promise of a warning label isn’t enough. The company should either give all apps the option of opting out of AI summaries, or offer an opt-out to the developers of specific classes of apps (like news apps). Next, it should probably build separate pathways for notifications of related content (a bunch of emails or chat messages in a thread) versus unrelated content (BBC headlines, podcast episode descriptions) and change how the unrelated content is summarized. Perhaps a little further down the road, news notifications should be summarized based on the full text of the news article, rather than generating a secondhand machine summary of a story already summarized by a human headline writer.

In all the years Snell and I have been doing what we do, I don’t think we’ve ever come so close to writing the exact same take at the same time. The only subtle differences are that (a) I side with Apple in not giving developers the option to opt out of notification summaries, and (b) that I’m a bit more of the mind that Apple can address this by somehow making it more clear which notifications are AI-generated summaries. Like, perhaps instead of their “↪︎” glyph, they could use the 🤪 emoji.

Update: Guy English:

Use the Apple logo. If you’re going to usurp the hard won decades of trusted reporting the BBC has with your own automated hot take you should put your reputational wood behind the arrow. Put your logo on what you generate from other people’s work.

My wacky emoji idea is obviously a joke, but this isn’t. Sign your work. Take responsibility for it.

★ Monday, 6 January 2025