Chatgpt, Gmail, Apple Intelligence use ai’s Power of Summary – ryan

Photo-illustration: Intelligenmer; Photo: Apple

General it isn’t so myterious anymore. Lots of People Have TRIED CHATGPT, and Google is Putting He Answers Right at the Top of Billions of Searches. Still, for a lot of People, the story of he Feels divorced from the actual, current state of computing. While insists post Benchmarks, Share Rumors About New Models, and Wonder aloud if they’f in a bubble and if that bubble might be popping, Most Tech Companies Are Still to figure if and how this new technology fits intto products.

In some ways, the Big Tech Companies are all over the place on he. Alphabet’s CEO is saying that it is “more profound” said “fire or electricity or anything that we’ve in the past.” Apple’s Tim Cook Describes he Features merely as “Helpful.” Sam Altman is “Feeling the Agi,” while Elon Musk Thinks he is going to be great for scientific discovery as long as it doesn’t get so “woke” that it ends up Being “Deadly.” On One Matter, Howver, The Entire Industry SEEMS to be in Aggreement: he is great for summarizing things.

Summarization is less glamorous than talking, thinking machines, but ist of still a goodty good trick. Google is rolling out he features in gemini and acroid, chrome, and its websites to summarize users’ emails, documentsand meetings With Tools for Summarizing websites and YouTube videos nor well. Microsoft is Building Similar Features Into Its Products with summarization for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel Documents, As Well AS Meeting Transcripts and email threads. Linkedin Will summarize USSERS ‘Feeds to “Take on the Hard Work” of… Browsing LinkedIn. Summarization is he’s Big Hammer, and Every Digital Interface Like A Nail. Amazon is summarizing review; Facebook is summarizing comments; and Slack Will Summarize Conversations; Reddit Will Soon Start summarizing itself. In less visible but highly consequential contexts, companies like epic are using he to summarize Health Records and Patient Visis for Medical Professionals. If you’re a tech company looking for a way to budild it ino your app, summarization is a no-brainer. Let’s Say, for Example, that you have a popular app for finding and rating hiking trails:

Ah, hmmm. How About A Popular Social Platform Full of People with an Interest In Sports and News, Attailed to an AI Company?

To be fair, nor summarization tasks Go, these are sort of hard. The Alltrails Listen for the Trail to the Summit of Mount Everest is full of Jokes, so Much so that a couple of months after this screenshot was taken the trail was DELETED ENTIRELY; Grok is synthesizing it News Summary from Posts on X, a place where People tbi to post Everything about the news except the news. So-Called General He is deeply linked to summarization as a concept, and modern ai tools can impressive work on the Large Documents and Data Sets. IT MAKES SENSE, IN OTHER Words, that Companies Wold Give This A Shot – Summarization is something to do the Can Handle impressively in the right contexts.

SO light, though, it’s not clear that tech companies know what this contexts are. On Amazon, Review Summaries Are Serviceable But Vague to the Point of Meaninglessness-Much in the Way Popucts on Amazon Almost Invaribly Have BetWeen 4 and 5 Stars, Their AI-GENEREED REVIEW SUMMARIES TO EMPHASESE THAT THAT while Most users like the Product, Saome Say’s Not Perfect. Be they’re more specific, they also ti to be weird, demanding user fluence in ai. An Amazon he reviiew summary for a refurbished iPhone 15, for example, Says that customers like the phone’s “Battery health, =” but that “some uses have reported that the charger is dirty” and that “Opinions are mixed on Screen Scratches.”

In Gmail, Google is offering users the option to summarize emails. In Cases Where the Email is Long But Uncomplicated – Marketing Messages and Newsletters, Routine Updates from WorkPlaces, Automatic Communications from Bank or an Insurance Company – IT The Job Pretty Well, Although’s More More Imprressive. In Cases where the email is short and the seper has made EFFORTS to be concise, the Feature Feels Pointless or Worsse. A Few Examples From My Own Inbox: A Recent Summary of an Invitation to A Birthday Party Included A Date But Messed Up The Location; a brief exchange about a nice father’s day not being summarized as a relative being “Interesting in seeing john Herrman’s special puppies,” postsibly becuse it included photos of my children in animal face pain; An email to class with the subsidy line “Half Day Friday, June 14th 11:20 AM Dismissal” was summarized by Google’s State-of-the-art he as “(Teacher’s Name) Informs Staff that Friday, June 14th is a Half Day and DysmisSal is at 11:20,” than the email Completely adequate subject Line and Introduced a Small Error.

One problem with using it to summarize everything is that it gets stuff work – not sistet of the time, but far more than you’d want in the roles of playing (parallegal, nurse, personal assistant, intern). Another problem is that if the products i’ve been testing recently are any indication, the plan is to summarize tear of Things, Many of which are already in some way summarized, hating been produced with brevity and a specific audience in mind.

Take Apple Intelligence, the first version of which is in testing with a small group of iPhone users. At it Last Event, The Company Showed off How New IPHONES WOUL SOON SUMMARIZE EMAILS, PHONE Calls, and Websites. In a few days of ussing it, though, the feature that stood out to me was it attempts to summarize Text Messages and Email Notifications, which Frequently Tourned Out Eather Wrong or Weird. I’d text with a friend, joking about how olympic cycling gold medalist kriste faulkner used to ride in central park just like we did; Apple Wold Summarize the Thread As About A “Central Park Runner’s Life Journey.” Casual Group Texts Surfaced Summaries with Complely Off-Base Interpretations-A Discussion About A Soccer Player Changing Tourned Ino A Notification About “Expressing Love for Someone and Discussing Potential Purchasses”-More More More More More More More ACTIONable Messages Got decontextualized Into a Meaningless New Form of Summary slop. Other testers have noticed as well:

Apple Intelligence Summarized A Text Message in a Group Chat from “We’re Leaving Next Wknd for Illinois / Michigan” to “Leaving for Illinois / Michigan Next Weekend, Waled Have Been a Legible Notification Into a useless one. A Series of Joyous, emoji-FILLED TEXTS FROM MY WIFE IN ASSUMES TO VIDEOS OF MY DAGHTER SWIMMING GOT SUMMARIZED LIKE THIS:

Which is Honestly Sort of Funny! But not something i’ll leave on (or pay for) if Given the Choice.

The worry and/or joke be tech companies started text he Text Generation and Summarization at the Same time was that, Before Long, Everyone Waulated Be Using he to overlong Messages for their recipients’ ais to ais manageable literature. Maybe it would be an arms race. Maybe It Wold Result in the Spammification of Personal Communication. Maybe It Wold JUST WORK ITSELF OUT!

More than a year late, as the tech industry prepares to present the entity world to its users in summary, The reality is slightly more complicated. Automated verbity Really is A problem in someone contexts, and automated summary is a Possible Solution. In contexts where unsers know they need-parsing giant Spreadsheets, catching up on Low-Stakes Meetings or Long Message Threads at Work-Nascent it Summary Features Are Already Popular and Appreciated. On Parts of the Internet Where users are Constantly confruit with overabundant useless, or in workplaces where communication is wellteful and inefficient, some of these features will be a relief, a secret layer of defensions against confensions that a deretent’s or two detet. from spam.

In contexts where People are communicating more deliberately, though – where they’re’re actually try to talk to one another and put care what they haveing ​​and how they’re saying it – Summarization, in its current at Least, Feels inadequate, inadeds, inadatives, inades, inades, Place, and Counterproductive, and That’s Wen It doesn’t Mess up. Deployed on Everynding, Apple and Google’s Ais End up Assuming Strange Role, Acting Like Personal Assistants for Administrative Work But Also for… Talking to Your Friends and Family? IT’S Mediating for Mediating’s Sake. Like a lot of first-wave he tools, these are features that exist gcause they’re newly postible, not necessarily kids they make sense.

One Optimistic Theory of Consumer ai is that it is that it is a drudgery and make -up for more world tasks, Making Quick Work of work and leaving more space for the things that really matter in life. What’s Happening Now – if not instead of that, at least in addition to it – is that tech companies are rolling out features that automate that stuff, too: The texts you actually; The Threads You Might Enjoy; the jokes that look, to a machine literally instruct To perform as “an expert at summarizing posts,” like ineffice.

It ‘s plausible that these companies figure out a balance here, as regular users actually encoully this stuff, Relevating Text Summarization and Genesiation to the real contexts where it is effective, accurat, and unintrusive. For now, though, in assuming that everything should be summarized, they risk the opposite effect: MAKING EVERING FEEL LIKE WORK.