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Comment by lilyball | Hacker News Reader

If you enable a feature that summarizes messages, then messages get summarized. Summarizing messages requires rewriting them. Where is the surprise here? Not only that, but the moment you click on the summary, you see the whole thing. Whether that's clicking the email summary to view the email, or clicking a summarized notification stack to expand it and see the notifications. The summary doesn't replace the message, it just lets you know whether it's something you want to click on.

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The summary of a spam message is "this is a spam message", not "you've gotten the inheritance of a Nigerian prince".

We're being told that AIs are basically as smart as humans, that AGI is arriving this year and all our jobs are on the line. The average human assistant would not get this assignment wrong.

It's not the job of a summary model to identify spam. The summary model runs after junk filtering, so everything that is given to the summary model is, by definition, already classified as "not spam". A summary model that decides the thing it's supposed to be summarizing is spam is a broken summary model.

If a summary model cannot summarise spam as 'spam' then its not a very good summary model.

What’s spam to me is a good deal or important information to somebody else. This is a text summarization model, not a personal assistant.

While that's technically true for theoretical other cases, I sincerely doubt anyone could argue that this applies to this particular example.

Is your argument that it cannot determine obvious spam - because there are people thatd classify some authentic emails as spam?

If something can be obviously determined as spam, it shouldn't make it through the spam filter, which runs way before this model.

If the spam detection model can't, e.g. because doing so would require more context on the user and more capabilities, I don't think a summarization model would be able to help, and you'd need something more like a "personal assistant" model.

That said, I don't think we are too far away from that, but this particular model is not that.

The average human assistant would absolutely get this wrong. I've been absolutely amazed at how vulnerable the average human is.

One example, a city manager sent $150k via wire transfer to a foreign account because a phishing email told them to. 1) The city didn't typically pay things by wire transfer 2) The amount was much more than would normally be handled by this person's role alone 3) The process for paying something required an invoice and approvals, an email should never have been enough to trigger this response.

>The average human assistant would absolutely get this wrong

“The average human falls for scam texts” is a funny thing to make up in pursuit of defending software that falls for scam texts. Scammers send out these texts by the thousands because the average human does not fall for scam texts.

Most people are average, which would mean most people that you know have fallen for scam texts if your position were true. Is it true in your social circle that most people you know have fallen for scam texts and given the scammers money?

From my perspective it doesn't matter if AIs are smarter than human assistants. The problem here is that AI summarization is predictable. Spammers will run the summarization tooling on their own AI-generated messages until they find candidates that don't get recognized as spam. No matter how smart the AI is, they'll eventually beat it. I'm sure the results are going to be super fascinating.

Apple intelligence summarization is certainly not predictable. it can do some really funny things

Most of these systems are randomized, but given sufficient oracle access to the APIs you should be able to detect which messages are likely to get summarized as non-spam.

its not about randomness per-message. rather it can summarize a given message in a very weird non intuitive way. the summarization itself can be bad

The on-device model that Apple is using for this isn’t billed as “basically as smart as humans,” to be fair. It’s likely just a small text summarization model, not a foundation model like GPT-*.

I think the marketing is deliberately vague. The feature is called "intelligence" but it's literally not intelligent.

You’re reading the marketing copy wrong!

It’s clearly as intelligent as an Apple, at least on par with a Granny Smith!

> We're being told that AIs are basically as smart as humans, that AGI is arriving this year and all our jobs are on the line.

Two of those are lies writ large, and I hope that most here understand which two.

Even worse, we have done a good job of detecting spam before AI was a thing.

That’s not a summary, that’s an interpretation/editorialization.

Every summary is an interpretation/editorialization. That's what happens when you have to pick out what is important or not. A poor summary of a text picks out and presents the unimportant bits.

Yes, but there are degrees/layers to this, and having different words for each makes sense.

At a very very high level, a spell checker and an editor advising on your target audience's aesthetic preferences and cultural nuances are the same thing; at the level we're talking about here the distinction becomes important.

Imagine asking an editor how to spell "xenomorph" and their feedback is to tell you to rewrite your story in a fantasy setting instead.

> We're being told that AIs are basically as smart as humans, that AGI is arriving this year and all our jobs are on the line.

I mean, not by anyone worth listening to, tho.

Not all rewriting and not all summarization is the same, and the surprising part is that it often makes it seem more legitimate. There's no reason, for example, that it couldn't rephrase it in a way that conveys it as suspicious.

I like the idea that something has to be surprising rather than factual to be “news”.

A dispassionate and accurate description of a new feature that reaches millions of users? Not news. The lead singer of Limp Bizkit having an unexpected cameo in a recent movie where he sings an acoustic George Michael cover? That’s news baybee!

> Summarizing messages requires rewriting them. Where is the surprise here?

You need to move from describing the process to reviewing the content. If rewriting makes it harder to see it's a scam when you expected the opposite, here is your surprise

The surprise is in how to make clickbait titles that sell on the AI fear

the point is that Apple intelligence is bad and not that AI is bad

Yeah, to be honest, the only reason I wrote the comment was because my understanding is HN stories whose comments/points ratio is higher get downranked and I'm tired of seeing clickbait artificial outrage stories.

A human summary would say " This smells like BS". This article though smells legit. This is an actual problem that it doesn't seem intelligent enough to handle.

Very few if any of the AIs have reasoning yet. Yes, a human would be able to think through and tell you it’s spam or better yet not even bother telling you about the message _because_ it is spam but we aren’t quite there yet.

My mom's iPhone should not be summarising spam messages if we "aren't quite there yet."

Considering the spam message could be written better using AI I don’t really see how a bad summary makes that much worse. Spammers can make their messages better before they were sent using AI. If you think your mom is at risk maybe that’s the issue that needs to be solved separately.

This isn’t it rewriting the message only the notification. And the feature is disable-able and not on by default from what I found since I had to go look for it to enable it.

>If you think your mom is at risk maybe that’s the issue that needs to be solved separately.

This is a good point. The rise of chat gpt means that only the most savvy should use tech

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