There’s a lot to like about Apple Intelligence, although not always in the places you’d expect. I had high hopes for making ‘Memories’ videos from a text prompt. And it worked, catching me unawares by how great a job it made of building a video about my dearly departed dog. Good boy, iPhone. Good boy. But I got a very different and unexpected type of joy from notification summaries. Not through them being useful and saving me time, but because they were often deeply and amusingly surreal.
In attempting to compress messages from friends, Apple Intelligence resorts to bizarre and almost haiku-like constructions as algorithms strip context and attempt to squash what remains into a handful of words. “7cm snow reported; complaining about tax dodging by landowners”, it said last week. I was grateful for the semi-colon, inferring that it probably wasn’t the snow itself that was very grumpy.
“Photo shared, joking about grasping, …