Apple Intelligence notification summaries are honestly pretty bad

I have been using the Apple Intelligence notification summary feature for a few months now, since pretty early in Apple’s beta testing process for the iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 updates.

If you don’t know what that is—and the vast majority of iPhones won’t get Apple Intelligence, which only works on the iPhone 16 series and iPhone 15 Pro—these notification summaries attempt to read a stack of missed notifications from any given app and give you the gist of what they’re saying.

Summaries are denoted with a small icon, and when tapped, the summary notification expands into the stack of notifications you missed in the first place. They also work on iPadOS and macOS, where they're available on anything with an M1 chip or newer.

I think this feature works badly. I could sand down my assessment and get to an extremely charitable “inconsistent” or “hit-and-miss.” But as it's currently implemented, I believe the feature is fundamentally flawed. The summaries it provides are so bizarre so frequently that sending friends the unintentionally hilarious summaries of their messages became a bit of a pastime for me for a few weeks.

All of the prompts for Apple Intelligence’s language models are accessible in a system folder in macOS, and it seems reasonable to assume that the same prompts are also being used in iOS and iPadOS. Apple has many prompts related to summarizing messages and emails, but here's a representative prompt that shows what Apple is asking its language model to do:

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