Apple appears to have incorporated some hidden prompts into macOS Sequoia to help Apple Intelligence avoid hallucinations and ensure feature accuracy.

Reddit user devanxd2000 discovered pre-prompted instructions embedded in the macOS 15.1 developer's beta. These prompts are designed to ensure that Apple Intelligence does not create hallucinations (a phenomenon where the AI reports incorrect information) and that all information is accurate and user-friendly. Some of the submissions include examples from Apple Mail's Smart Reply and Apple Photos' Memories feature.

For example, for Smart Reply, the AI is programmed to identify relevant questions from the email and generate concise responses. Thus, the prompt says, "You are an email assistant that can help identify relevant questions and short reply snippets from a given email. Once you have been given an email and a snippet of replies, please ask the relevant questions explicitly asked in the email."

Apple Intelligence also stipulates that questions should "not be asked that can be answered in a reply snippet. Questions should be short, no more than 8 words. On the other hand, Apple Intelligence's Memories feature in Apple Photos, which generates video stories from users' photos, has its own guidelines. The prompt instructs AI to create positive stories that do not contain controversial or harmful content.

The prompt states, "The story guidelines you must follow are: do not write stories that are religious, political, harmful, violent, sexual, filthy, or in any way negative, sad, or provocative.

Finally, Apple's AI tool includes general instructions to avoid hallucinations. For example, the writing tool prompt reads as follows When an email is sent, a draft response is initially provided based on a short snippet of a response. To make the draft response cleaner and more complete, a set of questions and their answers are provided. Please revise your draft response to incorporate the given question and its answer and write a concise and natural response. Responses should be no more than 50 words. Do not hallucinate. Do not make up facts.

It is good that Apple is trying to avoid the common pitfalls that plague AI; it is interesting to see some of the inner workings of AI, but it will not cover some of the frustration from customers who are disappointed that they cannot use AI features on their iPhone unless they upgrade.

Apple Intelligence will be fully rolled out with iOS 18.1 this fall. For more information, see 5 Apple Intelligence features to try first on your iPhone.