Joanna Stern has written about this before, but in her email newsletter this week, she addresses the fact that Apple Intelligence continues to misgender her spouse:
Here’s a notification for you, Apple: There is no husband.
Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage—because, again, I don’t have one. Wife? Yes. Husband? No.
She goes on:
Apple’s “intelligent” notification summaries have been …uhhhhh… making things up as LLMs often do, and after repeated complaints from the likes of the BBC, Apple is changing how they work. Chance Miller has details:
Here are the changes included in iOS 18.3 for Apple Intelligence notification summaries:
- When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature – like all Apple Intelligence features – is a beta.
- You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center by swiping, tapping “Options,” then choosing the “Turn Off Summaries” option.
- On the Lock Screen, notification summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications.
- In the Settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries “may contain errors.”
The further we get into the Apple Intelligence Era, the more unhappy I am with the company’s whole approach to these features. These changes coming in iOS 18.3 should have been there from day one.
Graham Fraser at the BBC:
This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.
A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”.
Apple declined to comment.
I used notification summaries during the beta of iOS 18.2, but ended up turning them off. I felt like I was reading everything twice, and saw summarization errors all over the place. None of them were as spicy as this Mangione example, thankfully.
iOS 18.2 is rolling out today, bringing the next wave of Apple Intelligence features with it.1
The splashiest feature is Image Playgrounds, which allows users to create images based on photos in their image libraries:
(Don’t look too closely at my hand in the image on the right.)
Apple’s system will not create realistic images, and is instead limited to two styles: “Animation” and “Illustration,” as you can see here:
Thomas Kleine Buening, Aadirupa Saha, Christos Dimitrakakis, Haifeng Xu, on Apple’s “Machine Learning Research” blog:
Motivated by the phenomenon of strategic agents gaming a recommendation system to maximize the number of times they are recommended to users, we study a strategic variant of the linear contextual bandit problem, where the arms strategically misreport privately observed contexts to the learner. % under strategic context manipulation. We treat the algorithm design problem as one of \emph{mechanism design} under uncertainty and propose the Optimistic Grim Trigger Mechanism (OptGTM) that minimizes regret while simultaneously incentivizing the agents to be approximately truthful. We show that OptGTM achieves sublinear regret despite the agents being unrestricted in their ability to game the learning algorithm by misreporting contexts. We then also show that failing to account for the strategic nature of the agents results in linear regret. However, a trade-off between incentive-compatibility and regret minimization is shown to be unavoidable. More broadly, this work provides insight into the intersection of online learning and mechanism design.
She’s the best tech YouTuber out there:
Siri wasn’t part of her project for hilarious and obvious reasons. When the four examples start talking to each other things get weird, and Stern is right to worry about the ramifications of technology like this.
Apple’s VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack gave Nilay Patel a quote about how Apple views photography in our modern age. Here’s what he said:
Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened.
Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.
That number is against just $9 million in sales, which is pretty bad, but it gets worse, according to Kylie Robison:
Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again.The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone. One source said they don’t believe Humane has disposed of the old Pins because “they’re still hopeful they can solve this problem eventually.” T-Mobile declined to comment and referred us to Humane.
David Sparks, writing about the rumors that say the new Siri won’t show up until next year:
The big question about all the Apple Intelligence elements is not “When do we get them?” but “Do they work”? Significant market pressures forced Apple to explain its AI position, and now it has. I generally agree with the thinking behind Apple Intelligence, and if it works as promised, it will be very impressive.
Mark Gurman, writing at Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. will get an observer role on OpenAI’s board as part of a landmark agreement announced last month, further tightening ties between the once-unlikely partners.
Phil Schiller, the head of Apple’s App Store and its former marketing chief, was chosen for the position, according to people familiar with the situation. As a board observer, he won’t be serving as a full-fledged director, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public.
Tom Warren, writing at The Verge:
Happy Windows on Arm day. Microsoft is launching its Copilot Plus PCs today, with Qualcomm-powered chips inside. If you’re wondering where our reviews are, Microsoft and most of its OEM partners haven’t seeded devices ahead of today’s launch because of Microsoft’s Recall… recall. I have started testing a Surface Laptop today, and we’ll have a full review of this new Windows on Arm hardware as soon as possible.
Microsoft is planning to launch its new Copilot Plus PCs next week without its controversial Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on these new laptops. The software maker is holding back Recall so it can test it with the Windows Insider program, after originally promising to ship Recall as an opt-in feature with additional security improvements.
“We are adjusting the release model for Recall to leverage the expertise of the Windows Insider community to ensure the experience meets our high standards for quality and security,” says Microsoft in an updated blog post. “When Recall (preview) becomes available in the Windows Insider Program, we will publish a blog post with details on how to get the preview.”
