Remember when Apple dropped a bombshell last year during its annual event, sharing that AI was coming to its new iOS last fall? And that email geeks all over the world thought that it was the end of the preview line as we knew it?
Well, the Beta version of their Apple Intelligence has been available in the U.S. for many months now, and most marketers have yet to see a widespread impact on their program… though they are mildly amused (and occasionally horrified) by some of the results.
This past December, we wrote about its inception, along with the email community’s overall observations over mismatches between emails’ content and their AI-generated previews and the Monster’s solution for it.
Delivering outrageously false news
“Think it might be time to turn off AI summaries… (my partner is fine)”, Reddit user “aqua_lake” shared a gut-wrenching screenshot that read “See how your music performed; your partner was hit by a car.”
“Honestly my heart sank into my stomach when I saw that notification,” they said and explained that the message came from a community posting website from their old hometown. Someone else did get hurt, unfortunately, but not the partner in question.
Other examples that users of the community platform posted could give anyone a minor and momentary heart attack, with messages like “someone broke into your house and stole your loot” and “Moon got obliterated and lost craters”…
Surely such messages would make anyone do a double-take, because when you read those again you realize that the only one using terms like these is your favorite video game!
Cutting to the (hilarious) chase
Can we all agree that sending emails to subscribers about their money is slightly more important than other emails?
Money is a sensitive topic to many, and knowing what your bank does with your money is not to be ignored. So you can’t help but laugh at this AI-generated summary, and the fact that all it brought up was the unsubscribe link included in the email.
Who doesn’t love a good discount? If you ask Apple Intelligence, it’s well worth it to be a subscriber of a certain yawn-inducing bedroom company, because theirs are hard to beat. And if you think it’s too good to be true, you’re absolutely right. When subscribers opened the emails they discovered a $100 off instead. This brand’s marketing team must’ve been so happy with their Black Friday open rates, but oh so confused about this email’s overall performance.
The coveted “inbox zero” concept is nothing but a distant dream for this user, who shared this perfect screenshot: “Unread emails hit 100,000, app politely suggested giving up,” with an image of the appropriately shocked Pixar character, Nemo, as their screen’s background photo. To be honest, if we reached 100,000 unread emails, we would’ve certainly considered giving up and closing that inbox too, but it’s certainly a bold suggestion coming from an AI.
The math ain’t mathing
When you buy anything online, the most common and expected thing is to get an order confirmation email. Apparently, when it comes to numbers and order confirmations, Apple AI’s summaries are still lagging behind.
Can anyone understand what’s the order status here? Is it purchased or canceled? Maybe both? Even though AI is supposed to help users save time, displays like these make us more confused than anything else!
Last but not least, let’s not forget about the turtles…
We’re not sure what the awkward situation at work is, or if turtles were somehow related to it, but seeing this preview made us laugh out loud. If anything, we actually do hope that “no turtles left” caused the awkward situation. And if so, this must be such a cool place to work in!
Of course, it’s worth noting that although Apple Intelligence seems to get a lot of fairly basic things wrong, some users have reported that they enjoy or benefit from having it on their devices. If the learning and improvement curve of other AI tools are any indication, Apple will be bettering its AI summaries capabilities fast enough.
How to avoid these… miscommunications
The good news is that it still has not deterred the channel’s overall performance – especially if you look at the data collected from billions of emails sent through the Inbox Monster platform during Cyber Week. To help your emails and AI previews stay more aligned, some of the tried and true best practices apply more than ever: make sure you have plenty of live text, highlight important offers and ideas, keep content concise and focused, ensure your code is tidy and your alt text is descriptive.
If you already want to take a step further, at Inbox Monster, we’ve already enabled the option to preview your content’s AI-generated summaries. If you’d like to check it out, just drop us a line at sales@inboxmonster.com so we can test out your next send.
