Apple's predictive text system contains a restricted "grey list" of over 100,000 words and phrases that the keyboard will not complete, according to independent researcher Derik Kauffman. The list includes politically sensitive terms such as "Trayvon Martin", "Kashmir dispute", and "Muslim extremist", as well as phrases like "Australia is a very bad place" and "on MDMA". In Hebrew, "the occupied territories" is blocked, while in Arabic, "the Hamas movement" is restricted.
The list also covers drug references and sexual acts, though Apple maintains users can still type any word manually. The discovery stemmed from Kauffman's observation of swipe-typing issues, leading him to uncover the encoded table within Apple's operating system. The list illuminates how autocorrect functions, evolving from simple lookup tables to transformer-based AI systems.
Apple states the keyboard is designed to avoid offensive suggestions, but the grey list represents a hard-coded limitation on swipe-typing functionality, occasionally causing unintended substitutions like "United Iceland" for "United Ireland".
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing