iPhone keyboard: Apple's grey list blocks 100,000 phrases

Independent researcher Derik Kauffman found a table of more than 100,000 words and phrases that Apple keeps out of its predictive text. He spotted the problem himself: some phrases were hard to type on his iPhone, others were not. That led him to the list, encoded in Apple's operating system. Kauffman's other work includes using AI to find errors in scientific papers. The list stops the keyboard from suggesting these entries, and swipe-typing them often goes wrong.

Some entries are predictable: references to drugs, sexual acts and, in a corporate spirit, "iMessage isn't working". Others look political. The list includes "Trayvon Martin", the Black teenager shot in Florida in 2012, plus "Kashmir dispute", "Muslim extremist" and "male chauvinist pig". In Hebrew, "the occupied territories" is not completed; in Arabic, neither is "the Hamas movement". Kauffman told Reuters the politically charged entries amount to a "light-touch form of censorship". Swipe typing can also mangle phrases: "United Ireland" can come out as "United Iceland".

Autocorrect has changed shape over the years. In its earliest version, the Unix operating system checked each typed word against a table to see if the spelling was right. That gave way to n-grams, which predict the next word from the ones before it. This is the basis of the familiar Apple autocorrect that turned expletives into "fork" and "ducking". Last year Apple launched a "transformer-based" autocorrect, closer to an LLM. Reddit users linked it to a run of odd spelling suggestions on their iPhones.

Apple said it built the keyboard to avoid inappropriate or offensive predictive suggestions. The company also said iPhone users can always type out specific words or phrases and override predictive suggestions to get the meaning they want. So the list limits what the keyboard offers, not what you can enter. A separate glitch once flashed the name "Trump" on screen when users said "racist" into dictation; Apple fixed it quickly.

If a phrase keeps getting corrected or a swipe keeps failing, the grey list is one explanation worth knowing. You can spell the words out letter by letter and reject the suggestion the keyboard offers. The list sits inside the operating system, so it is not something you switch off in settings. What stays open is how far the entries reach beyond the examples named here.