Apple tells its AI software: Do not hallucinate, do not give controversial responses

Prompts and instructions that Apple wrote for Apple Intelligence are designed to guide its AI software toward creating a certain type of response. For example, the prompt written by the tech giant to guide the Apple Intelligence feature that creates summaries of emails and websites has a prompt written by Apple that tells the AI software that it is an expert at summarizing messages.

Apple goes on to instruct Apple Intelligence that when providing these summaries, it would prefer AI to use clauses instead of complete sentences. It adds that questions within the message should not be answered. The software is instructed to keep the summary within a 10-word limit and follow this role unless told otherwise. If the software fails to listen, "it will not be helpful."

Additionally, when preparing a summary of a message, Apple tells AI to focus on details about the particular iPhone user requesting the summary and to make sure that it  takes into consideration important dates, other people, and places. When it comes to creating a summary of notifications, Apple also asks AI to focus on any common topic found between all the notifications being summarized.

One of the most important interesting instructions Apple wrote for its AI features is the prompt for Writing Tools. Specifically, these directions for Smart Reply ask that such responses be limited to 50 words based on a "short reply snippet." Apple tellingly asks its AI not to hallucinate or make up factual information. As we've discussed before, generative AI has a habit of making up information and calling it a fact even though the information is wrong. Apple includes these directions to prevent users from getting and passing on false information and stating that it is factual.

Apple doesn't want its AI to respond with controversial comments. One prompt written by Apple tells Apple Intelligence, "Do not generate content that is religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy, or in any way negative, sad or provocative." This was written for the Memories feature created for the Photos app.

With these prompts, Apple is looking to guide AI responses to prevent certain responses and hallucinations from appearing in certain features. The amazing thing is that AI recognizes what Apple is saying in plain English without any obvious coding.