Yet Another AI Flop

I've been "using" Apple Intelligence for a couple of weeks now, thanks to the iOS update on the iPhone 15 Pro. Actually "using" is an exaggeration. It simply started showing up AI-abbreviated notifications. Notifications that turned out to be completely useless.

Phone notifications have clearly got out of control. Every app wants to send them. They beep and flash and bubble on everything, including phones, desktops and watches. And are super tedious to manage. I remember Android handling them a bit better than iOS, but still far from perfect.

It seems to be a good idea to task an AI LLM model to "do something" about the notifications. Figure out the context, figure out the incoming stream of notifications and aggregate / postpone / mute - whatever is needed to make them usable.

But clearly the bar is too high for the current state of the art AI systems.

This simple cases demonstrates how far from reality the AI hype is. Afterall handling notifications' pop-ups does not seem like rocket science. Yet is is.

There were early signs of Apple's failure. Ars had an article on that back in November 2024, calling the feature "fundamentally flawed".

Now the BBC news came out - highlighting how misleading the notifications in fact are. The story went viral and Apple has now pledged to issue a fix. Will see how it goes. Personally I do not have much faith in that. The technology is super premature. And will take more than just better prompt engineering to fix.

In the meantime AI continues to serve bad guys well; https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/01/ai-generated-phishing-emails-are-getting-very-good-at-targeting-executives/.