Apple Blocks 100,000+ Words in Predictive Text

Apple's iPhones employ a hidden 'grey list' containing over 100,000 words and phrases that are restricted from predictive text completion. This discovery, made by independent researcher Derik Kauffman, reveals that phrases such as 'Dictator Trump', 'NSA spies', and even 'Australia is a very bad place' must be manually typed. The list reportedly encompasses a range of content, from drug references and sexual acts to politically sensitive terms like 'Trayvon Martin' and 'Kashmir dispute'.

In other languages, the restrictions extend to phrases like 'the occupied territories' in Hebrew and 'the Hamas movement' in Arabic. Kauffman described this hard-coded list as a 'light-touch form of censorship'. Apple maintains that its keyboard is designed to prevent inappropriate suggestions and that users can always override predictive text by typing out desired words or phrases. This revelation sheds light on the complex mechanisms behind autocorrect, which has evolved from simple spell-checking to sophisticated n-gram predictions and, more recently, transformer-based systems akin to LLMs.