Apple’s grey list: Words and phrases your iPhone won’t help you spell

I wrote something like this a long time ago. The customer's request was: "don't make this software produce swear words on its own". Note: on its own.

Producing "trump is …" when a user wants that is one thing. Producing that when the user wants something else could be construed as coming from the software itself, and we all know that people looking for a shitstorm will seize the opportunity.

So probabilistic software like a swipe interpreter will often be written to avoid some guesses, to lessen the chance of a shitstorm. Users who want that output have to use a dependable input method instead of one based on probabilities and guesswork.

IMO this avoidance isn't among the ten worst consequences of shitstorms.

Apple is choosing between two outcomes:

- There is a chance, quantified by some metric, where a person is suggested a word that is offensive to them or their culture because a probabilistic model made the wrong decision.

- There is no chance that the above happens.

Apple will choose the latter, time and time again, because they are risk averse and freedom is not particularly high on their values list. We’re talking about the company that doesn’t let you type the Taiwanese flag in China, or the pride flag in Russia. It’s no surprise you’re not allowed to swipe “fuck” in the United States. I used to work at Apple.

I'm guessing that somebody tried to swipe "Halas" or "Hamid" and it came out "Hamas", or "Tibetan obedience" and ended up with "Tibetan independence", which was followed by a visit from the police or being blacklisted from PayPal. Or "I want to question your artsy friend about the gallery" came out as "I want to question your sexuality, friend about the gallery".

There are cases like https://gizmodo.com/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-two-peopl... where, in 02008, Ramazan Çalçoban texted his estranged wife in Turkish, "you change the topic every time you run out of arguments", but the lack of the Turkish dotless "i" on his cellphone turned "sıkısınca" into "sikisinca", which looks more like a misspelling of "sikisince". So he ended up texting her, "You change the topic every time they are fucking you."

Long story short, his father-in-law murdered him for thus insulting his daughter's fidelity, following which he murdered the daughter in question, and the father-in-law committed suicide in prison.

So there might be certain words and phrases that it's best for your computers to not send to other people on your behalf unless they're really sure you mean them.

" If I made a physical keyboard that stops keys from working when you're about to finish typing something I don't want you to type, but you can still circumvent it, I still made a censorship keyboard."

No, this is the wrong analogy.

Keyboard helpers are 'positive aid' vs 'no aid', not 'restriction' vs 'no restriction'.

It's akin to seeing the 'default' on search to 'not have adult conent' -> you can make the adjustment yourself.

Helping you type the 'n-word' is a positive act.

It's perfectly reasonable to have any words they even remotely deem sensitive not in the dictionary.

The first time you meaningfully type a word though - it should go in the dictionary like a normal word and that's that.

If they were stopping people from putting words in the dictionary or making it harder - now that would be censorship.

If they won't put 'whatever' in the auto-option feature that would be 'restrictive' and bad.

But otherwise, it's 100% reasonable for them to chose the words they want to help you type.

And FYI this is also different from censoring search which could not be undone.

> If I made a physical keyboard that stops keys from working when you're about to finish typing something I don't want you to type

For anyone wondering the degree to which this is an exaggeration: The iPhone will physically work against you by invisibly changing the size of keys on the keyboard.

Every iPhone, since the very first, dynamically resizes the hitboxes of the iOS keyboard. This is invisible, can not be disabled, and the hitboxes overlap those of other keys.

They used to advertise this as "dynamic tap zones" but they removed the video for it, but you can see their advertising for it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPmVKyhyl9U

> I wonder what the boardroom meeting for this was like

I think its pretty easy to imagine. Execs dont want to be dragged in the news when the phone auto suggests something politically controversial. Companies are very risk averse when it comes to that sort of thing.

I doubt this was even controversial enough to warrant a meeting.

My brother was an iPhone engineer in the early days of the iPhone. They were called in for an emergency fix because “MLK” would autocorrect to “KKK”

I was there for a couple Google Suggest code yellows around naughty or racist suggestions and it's basically an email going out that's like "The Chinese government is making us remove offensive suggestions from Suggest. We need any native Chinese speakers here Saturday to come up with a list of anything that might be considered offensive. Pizza and swag will be provided." Or it's reactive to PR flaps: "[why are black] autocompletes to [...people so dumb]. Can we please block this suggestion?"

The concern with features like these is that the suggestions are considered to be corporate speech that the company is endorsing, and so it can be held liable for any that break relevant laws. Internet companies are generally considered common carriers when they're just passing around stuff other people write, but when they are generating their own content through machine-learning algorithms they are held to be the actual responsible party.

I'm surprised we haven't seen more lawsuits and criminal prosecution against LLMs so far, though it probably helps that the current U.S. president is a combative asshole that prides himself on how much he can offend every group under the sun.

The point is that the level of imprecision in swipe means there's more guessing; they don't want to guess things that frustrate the user. It is not censoriousness, it is minimising surprise.

I rather my swype words not be any of those options, because more often than not it picks the wrong or worst word possible, imagine sending your boss a text and it auto picks the worst word soup imaginable and as you proof read, oops you hit send.

I doubt it has anything to do with coercion. It’s you ever used swipe you’d know that you often you do go over the wrong letters so it’s probably just to stop bad stuff coming up that people didn’t intend.

> It's a sign of the times with how used tech companies are to 'softly' moderating societal trends by unilaterally tweaking the software that everyone uses.

I realize that there are many reasons to be critical of our digital overlords. This is not one of them.

This is in no way comparable to a physical keyboard stopping you from typing something, because what you are typing is entirely deterministic. Most computer software will underline only misspelled words or grammatical errors, not politically charged statements, because it is a literal interpretation of what the user typed.

Swipe typing and auto-complete are different because they are interpreting the user's input. There is no way to ensure the interpretation is correct. For the sake of both the users and the company, you ensure the interpretations are the ones that cause no harm.

I doubt it ever even got close to a boardroom, because it was probably a pretty easy decision made at a far lower level.

“I was talking about Winnie the Pooh, and my phone autocorrected Tigger into something much worse. We probably don’t want iPhones to autocorrect towards some words, even if they’re legitimate words. Do y’all think it makes sense to bias autocorrect away from potentially risky subjects?”

You can still type that word into your phone. You can still send it to anyone you wish. Autocorrect just isn’t going to suggest it to you on accident. Not autocorrecting to potentially embarrassing, uncomfortable, or sensitive subjects is probably a good idea that’s—at the iPhone scale—probably saved quite a few people’s jobs by not fat fingering something that would have gotten someone fired.

I agree with you that the whole concept of restricting terms on a keyboard is dystopian and your analogy to a physical keyboard which prevents you from typing certain terms is apt.

Apple should not be in the business of editorializing their users’ writings. The whole deferral to “well you can just manually type it out” raises the obvious question “then why can’t I swipe it out?”

  >and "we know what you wanted to type with 90% confidence

It’s amazing how many cultural influences stem from Big Tech (even though nobody gives them mandate for such things). I wouldn’t be surprised if the twisted versions of age verification popping up in various governments is lobby money from corps looking to deepen their walled gardens.

These all seem like phrases that people say a lot. If I had to guess what happened here, I’d suspect that the LLM being used for AutoCorrect was not successfully “alignment” (i.e. corporate happyspeak) tuned, it instead reflected the actual statistics of the internet, and the engineers resorted to inelegant brute force after having enormous difficulty getting it to talk like anything but a South Park caricature of Tourette’s.

Come to think of it, intuitively any attempt to solve this by tuning the LLM would make texters sound subtly like claude- in which case absolutely the blacklist is better.

Now imagine what they'll do with bidirectional BCIs. And Apple are among the least evil of the players.

> I wonder what the boardroom meeting for this was like.

"When testing autocomplete, we found some cases where it produces undesirable completions. Imagine if someone typed 'nazis are' and the autocomplete suggested 'good'. How fast would that screenshot get around social media with a tweet comparing iPhone to Grok, and turn into a news headline?"

I'm guessing that that's how this started. Then, a few steps later, "we're getting into China, what do we need to do to not get in trouble", "hey, we've got this mechanism, what if we add 'Tibetan independence' to it". (Which is bad, but on the same scale as all the other things businesses do to get into what they see as a large market that they can be blocked from at any time.)

Then, a few steps later, after some seriously questionable decision-making, someone had the bright idea to add "iMessage isn't working" to it. Frankly, that's the one I'm actually most baffled by here, because everything else seems like the natural consequence of a combination of bad-PR-avoidance and geopolitical kowtowing.

In this case, since you can still type whatever you like, supposedly "soft coercion" doesn't seem like coercion at all?

It seems like a way to make it sound more dramatic if you dislike it.

Not to dismiss your assertion, but here’s another way of looking at it:

Keyboard swiping involves some prediction work from the system. It is ultimately making a best guess from the keys your finger has passed through. The only truly “accurate” output would be for the keyboard to spell out the gibberish that arises from showing every key that the finger has swiped over. Anything intelligible is a guess.

Now because it is a guess, some may question the system or its makers, “Why did you guess this, and not that?” It is easy to see how this can make the maker of the system the target of a politically motivated group. For example, there is a difference between typing out “Dictator Trump” and my keyboard refusing to spell it out - a clear sign of censorship. However, when swiped, because of the guessing nature of the technology, I can understand that the maker of the system (Apple in this case) would not want to be seen endorsing these views. Hence, they do not offer up these politically charged phrases. We are free to type them out, because it is easy to point out that the intent is entirely from the user. However, it is harder to argue for this from the swiping keys gesture.

In my view, this is a more reasonable explanation.

> To the shocking number of people here who are justifying this or explaining how it only affect swipe input as if that makes it better: soft coercion is still coercion.

Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. Most likely it is implemented in such a way to produce the least amount of outrage.

This was not decided in a boardroom.

Most likely from user testing.

Yeah, and it’s always done in a way that corners you and makes it sound like you’re fighting to be able to call someone a racial slur - oh, we block x because it’s bad, surely you aren’t for calling people x right?

Unfortunately the broader more important point of censorship is drowned out in noise as designed

Same with how congress names their bills. Wow you’re not voting for the Save The Children from Internet Monsters act? What’s wrong with you?

Oh you mean the bill that grants the government cart blanche to go through anyone’s email without a warrant?

We’re in a tough spot here - there’s just nothing to pattern match to - not cleanly at least

The way a few tech companies can steer trends and conversations is unprecedented. The data collection is unprecedented

Specifically the scale is. People truly don’t understand the scale these companies operate at

No newspaper or wire tapping ever had the reach this stuff has now

My Samsung phone can search images by keyword and it actually works super well. It would be infinitely more useful to me if I could search by a certain class of "pics" and it helped with that. Especially when going through nation boundaries.

> I wonder what the boardroom meeting for this was like. Despite the outcome, I doubt the devs were pitching censorship as the reason for implementing this.

I imagine it went the same way that board meetings about any potential PR disaster go. "How bad of a reputational hit will we take if the NYT runs a headline about some kid getting auto suggested something culturally taboo on their iPad? Would it be more than the reputational hit we will take from the people that are annoyed that we won't auto suggest 'Nazi' to complete the phrase 'Trump is a' while they're typing out their tweets? If so, then let's add the list of "do not suggest" to our auto complete system." And that doesn't begin to count the bad press they could get if someone intentionally tries to get the auto complete system to generate something offensive. See also the AI companies getting shit because people were able to get the image generators to generate porn.

Such is the nature of trying to sell your products in a world where most people treat every single thing done by their technology as an intentional act chosen by the developers to specifically target them. If you want to buy someone else's package, you have to live with the fact that they are going to respond to the incentives to avoid headline scandals and government scrutiny much more strongly than to cater to a idealistic free speech model. This is why having a strong social and cultural free speech norm, that extends far beyond the legal letter of the law is so important. You want society as a whole to broadly consider free speech important and worth having over the inconvenience of Tiny Tim learning a new word today.

> I wonder what the boardroom meeting for this was like. Despite the outcome, I doubt the devs were pitching censorship as the reason for implementing this.

Looking at https://helgesver.re/articles/macos-vulgar-word-flags for the list.

I imagined it something like this:

  "Mao?" -"Bad, we think? But we want to allow 'LMAO'"

  "Next. Stalin?" -"Hmm... Uncle Joe. Only a few million killed. Not great, not terrible, let's keep him"

  "Pol Pot?" -"How many died in the Killing Fields?" "Not enough, keep him off the list".

That’s bullshit if you want swear words spell them fucking out on your own.

I don’t want to make a mistake calling someone cunt.

Even more so I DON’T want software type out cunt or fuck on its own to a person I totally don’t want to write fucking swear words.

Typed on an iPhone.

This isn't a "bug" with the iOS keyboard, this is directed and intentional censorship.

I still think the original iPhone keyboard in 2007 was better than what we have now. It’s been downhill ever since iOS 7.

I used to tell people just type and trust it to work, it was great. Now, even when I type the right thing, the auto-complete will screw it up after the fact. I feel like I need to proofread everything. I wish we could go back to whatever setup they had 19 years ago.

I'd argue iPhone got ahead of the game then just stopped getting at all better. Siri AI is straight garbage, they won't let the interface be anything but what they want it to be, and the app store lock in/lack of ad blockers on browsers has made it basically just a phone for me. I have no intention of upgrading beyond my 12, and when it finally dies, I'm probably moving back to some kind of android phone if there's not a viable open source model out there by then (viable for everything, banking, etc). I only moved to apple because the watch was leagues better at the time than samsung's offering, but now I can't even claim that (and quit wearing it years ago)

I'm surprised at this point they just don't pay google to license their keyboard

The hilariops think is that the phome with the mosy terrible keytoard wants to add a tagline to every eamail which can only be read as am apology.

- Sent from my iPhone.

In my experience it’s worse than it’s ever been in the 15 years I’ve been on iOS. It’s absolutely enraging to me. I’m too lazy and hate smart phones so much anyways that I am not investing mental cycles and emotion into switching. But it’s a disgrace how shitty it is.

I'm not sure you get what's exactly happening. It's not only not predicting, it's also "typing something else".

Swipe "Ireland" alone, works. "United" alone, works.

Same swipes but back to back, and now it's suddenly "United Iceland".

There's no predictive text involved here, this starts going into the willful territory.

Just because one mode of input is not censored doesn't mean that the other modes are not censored.

I was going to comment the same. It seems to be two things.

Auto Complete on Swipe Input and Next Word Predictive Input.

This is not an Autocorrect spelling issue.

If it was explicit and could be opt-out (partially or totally) it would be a good feature.

duck off

It's taking a position

> When I swing my finger around wildly it's making a best guess;

Alright, well some of us are actually deft at swiping text on our phones and would very much like the keyboard to type the word we entered.

>You can still type any of these things.

for now :)

True, it's a very user-oriented feature. That's why they let you disable it, and also let you edit the blacklist, so that you can prevent accidentally typing words that are offensive in your own cultural context.

... Actually I'm not sure if they let you do those.

Try getting things done on such a device in a military context. A thousand acronyms adopted by generals who dont know the internet from a hole in the ground. I saw a Gunnary Seargent scream when he saw his rank acronym (GySgt) get autocorrected on a form to gynocologist (i suspect he hit a suggested word popup). It is bad enough having to deal with the keyboard rejecting capital letters in the middle of a word.

Speaking of predictions, I can predict your religion just from this comment. I know I am not allowed to, but I can.

Of course! And the next logical step would be to restrict the entry of such phrases via the keyboard. Isn't an awful design choice either.

I was able to swipe type "United Ireland" just fine on my Pixel.

Can you easily swap out the functionality for something else on iOS and iPadOS like you can on Android?

I use FUTO keyboard and it won't predict naughty words either.

Thanks! Missed this post.

I don't think it's possible to have predictive text without moderation. If nothing else, it will "moderate" toward the mean of the training data, which will reflect inherent biases of the time and shift as culture shifts. What is "neutral" in one context will no longer be neutral in another (since every culture, even mutually English speaking cultures, are different).

I'm sympathetic to the idea that something as basic as a keyboard should have no say in what you type, but the only solution might be to turn off predictive text.

Disable this autocorrect and prediction then?

+1. Users are much more likely to notice, and make a scene, if the phone mispredicts something provocative.

"imessage isn't working"? really?

There are several levels to the autocorrection, so you can definitely do this. I've turned most autocorrect off on my iPhone at this point, because the people I talk to on a regular basis have a much easier time figuring out what I meant from regular misspellings than from the complete rewrite of phrases that iOS is fond of doing.

fu... autocomplete

At least 10 years. We've been complaining about this behavior for much longer than 5 years now.

It is absolutely worse, and other people's know have noticed as well. iOS 26 was the biggest drop in quality by far (haven't updated to 27 yet, so I don't know if it changed at all).

I'm leaving the above 'typo' in as an example of it. I initially typed "people I", and it showed up as "people I" at first, but after typing more it subtly and retroactively changed it to "people's". That's not something that should happen in general. It doesn't make sense grammatically or contextually, and S isn't anywhere near I on the keyboard.

That's not counting at least one other instance in this not-so-long comment where it did the same with "should" -> "show", but I fixed that one. I'm baffled no one at Apple seemed to notice and/or care that they actively made the keyboard worse.

Because their "hardware" is not a singular thing, but a complex package. How do people vote on any political party?

It's this company or a phone that runs highly privileged software by the world's greatest collector of information that should be private. Both choices are so awful my phone would not help me autocomplete any of the words I'd use to describe them.

While you comment reads as satire, I am afraid you really mean it.

"United Ireland" is also not tolerated in your showcase family? There's a huge difference between political ideas and outright profanity

A lot of these are genuinely things that you REALLY don’t want your phone accidentally sending to your boss or work colleagues.

The others are blatant censorship.

Makes sense to me. You could have God or god in the same place and not know which one is correct.

God isn’t universal either. You push a specific religion and cultural view on people by assuming every instance of God should be capitalized.

The answer seems obvious to me: train a user’s predictive swipe engine on solely their own messages. It gives them an easy out on controversy while removing the need for a filter list.

They do not, in fact, have to. They choose to. Don't ever let parties off the hook for choosing to do something just because they claim to fear PR blips if they don't.

I just don't get this logic. It's a keyboard, after all. It's meant for typing. It's like if my camera refused to take a picture of my butt because it might offend someone.

Which is reasonable - Australia is a very bad place!

Interestingly, I didn’t know who that was so I used the “Look up” feature and it said it was a “Murdered” person, but in the Wikipedia entry it says the shooter was acquitted - ie the victim was not found to have been murdered.

I wonder where that summary came from?

It’s neither censorship nor banning. It’s simply not autocompleted.

Did you miss /s by a chance, or is this serious?

they made a big point at their wwdc keynote a few years ago that they would no longer be autocorrecting the f-word to duck. i had assumed that meant a list like this existed and was being removed, but apparently it referred specifically to that word.

This is not a fucking thing anymore (typed from my iPhone)

> a brief glitch in which users of the dictation feature saw the name “Trump” flash across their screen when they spoke the word “racist” into their iPhones

"Glitch" more like "Easter egg" I suspect.

There was an emoji search/copy-paste web site that I use when I need to find an emoji. Once upon a time, when you typed "Trump" into the search, one of the results was the poop emoji. It no longer returns that, but it does return the Russian flag.

But what smartphone do I buy then?

If I want mainstream, my two other choices are Google and Samsung, and they are both even worse than Apple when it comes to "strangers poking around in your brain".

Should I give up on mainstream smartphones? Should I give up on smartphones entirely?