Apple Intelligence AI Summarizes Breakup Texts, Goes Viral

Leaders from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang to JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon have hailed AI as the technology driving the next industrial revolution. And while AI can lead to business impact and productivity gains, it can also be “unreal and dystopian,” one Apple Intelligence user discovered.

On Thursday, Nick Spreen, an app developer based in New York, posted that Apple Intelligence summarized a breakup text from his now ex-girlfriend. The summary simply read, “No longer in a relationship; wants belongings from the apartment.”

^{Credit: Nick Spreen/X}

Spreen told Ars Technica that the actual texts were more personal than the AI summary and that the summary “added a level of distance to it that wasn’t a bad thing.” Still, he said that “more than anything” getting an AI overview of a breakup text “felt unreal and dystopian.”

Spreen’s post, which was viewed over four million times, had been deleted at the time of writing.

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Apple Intelligence is the set of AI features specific to Apple devices, like AI voice-activated search, AI emoji generation, and AI email and text generation. The latest iOS 18.1 update, which rolled out this month, brings a beta version of Apple Intelligence to the iPhone to perform tasks like summarizing texts.

While AI can be used in business contexts, it also has less serious use cases. In August, a viral trend saw Instagram users asking ChatGPT to roast their Instagram profiles.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a conversation with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff last month that he mainly used the paid version of ChatGPT as a personal tutor. Benioff said that he uses ChatGPT as a therapist, a purpose echoed by other ChatGPT users, including content creators on social media.

Using AI for emotional support is common — in fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that it was one of the top ways to use Meta AI so far. People are using the technology to talk through complex social situations, he said.

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