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.

> 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?”

> 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.

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.