Eerie, clinical, and somewhat poetic: my thoughts on Apple’s text notification summaries
Further complications to the airflow
Sometime last week, I updated my phone to iOS 18.3, which seemed to activate the oft-threatened Apple Intelligence in full force. The most notable difference, upon reawakening my regrettable Cupertinoan brick, was the appearance of these new “Notification Summaries,” wherein Apple Intelligence (A.I., ha ha, get it) condenses the content of my text messages into bulletpoint-esque takeaways:
At first, these summaries provoked an immediate, predictable surge of disgust. I disabled them right away—which itself took some Googling to figure out how, which then prompted new waves of feeling cornered and helpless, like I was being made a stranger to my own phone. The steady creep of A.I. “assistance” into our digital lives has been happening for years now; I had felt similarly angered about developments like the automated Gmail response options (“Looks great!”) and predictive text messaging until, well, they got good enough to be helpful. So after a day or two, curious if I was just being a curmudgeon of convenience all over again, I reactivated these text summaries to see how I’d really feel about them.
Most of them were too boring to inspire much of a reaction, or so obviously garbled that I just felt annoyed for wasting 0.0002 seconds of my biological wonder of a life reading computerized nonsense. There was a general sensation of intrusion, of course, as if I still wanted to hold fast to the belief that, in 2025, my personal relationships and the way I conduct them on my phone can somehow still be shielded from what I imagine is just a running livestream being broadcast within various Silicon Valley / international tech company board rooms, accompanied by sorority-rush style commentary and jeering. (The meme-ified specter of an assigned FBI agent who observes our phone movements at least suggests that someone cares!)
Was it truly worth getting worked up about the latest way a tech company was inserting itself as a wafer-thin layer in between our interpersonal communications—and therefore, our human relationships? Didn’t the arrival of ChatGPT, if not the existence of the internet, already guarantee a future where my computer would talk to your computer to figure out what you and I want to eat for dinner, like a sub-class of Hollywood assistants promising each other whose people would reach out to whom. Still, it was undeniable that something was being lost, or rather, muffled in the plastic wrapping of these text summaries: Rather than checking my screen to see what my friends or my mother wanted to say directly to me, I was asking my computer to give me the highlights—the semantic essence, shorn of all the unnecessary context of linguistic quirks, inside jokes, and gorgeous wabi sabi of my mother’s eternal war with AutoCorrect (another intrusion we have largely submitted to). These summaries made the experience of checking my phone feel denuded and clinical, which is probably another way of saying that it was a fully optimized experience, bro.
And yet, there was an undeniable poetry, however unsettling, to some of it. I didn’t like the idea of a machine “reading” my private messages, but I did start thinking it was funny, over time, to see how these summaries were a sorting mechanism for the subtext of the original sentiments. By that I mean: While I (as a particularly text-based person) like to think the breadth of my message content (ew lol) regularly embodies the full spectrum of human thought and emotion, in reality, it appears that all we are ever really doing is one of a few defined tasks: sharing, forgetting, inquiring, complaining, apologizing. How analog even those tasks feel compared to the true subtext of these interactions, which is, what? Seeking validation or extending care or simply affirming coexistence. In the future, perhaps Apple Intelligence will manage to boil it down further and eventually eliminate the gratuitous nuisance of forming sounds and symbols entirely. You’ll just be able to ping me straight in the brain, and I’ll know how you feel—assuming my iChip bill has been paid for the month.
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