After all the trouble caused by Apple’s AI summaries for news apps like the BBC and the New York Times, Apple is coming back for more. The company has announced that “review summaries” are officially coming to the App Store, aiming to squish the most common points from hundreds or thousands of reviews into one AI-generated summary.
First spotted by Macworld, Apple has announced the coming feature on its developer site. The beta will start in iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 as part of a phased rollout, beginning with English-only summaries for a limited number of apps.
Apple says the summaries will be refreshed at least once a week and will eventually appear for every app “with enough reviews.” It doesn’t mention how many reviews are considered “enough,” but we might get more information in the future.
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As with a lot of AI summary features, this sounds like it could be useful if it can be trusted. However, it’s only been a few weeks since Apple’s AI incorrectly told people that tennis player, Rafael Nadal, had come out as gay — a perfect example of just how wrong AI can be about fairly important things.
Generating summaries for app reviews might not cause as much trouble as incorrect news headlines, but they could hurt app developers if things go wrong. If a summary accidentally includes an extreme opinion that only appeared in one out of thousands of reviews or just hallucinates something entirely, then app developers could find themselves losing out on downloads and purchases for no good reason.
Such inaccuracies wouldn’t benefit users either since they could miss out on a good app or end up downloading something that isn’t as good as the review summary made it out to be. However, it’s not impossible to do this well — Amazon has been using generated review summaries for nearly two years now, as has Microsoft.
Given Apple is playing catchup, it’s expected that this will have been tested to surface the right information — however, the rollout will be closely watched to see if the aggregation bugs have been ironed out for Apple.
