I can’t send a simple message to my mother or my wife anymore without wondering what kind of accidental crime I just committed. 🫨😖😅
A couple days ago, I tried to tell my mom I loved spending time (“handing out”) with her a few months ago when i was back in the states. I wrote that I look forward to when i get back so we can ‘hang out’ again.
However, my iPhone autocorrect wrote, “I really want to hang you.” 😵🤣
This was in a family group chat, and there was a different family dynamic between us that day - and a lot of teasing. Luckily, I am my mother’s favorite and i’m still in good standing, but my iPhone is not helping me keep that status.
I’ve been writing on mobile devices since the late 90s. I type rapid because my brain is far ahead of my typing. My wife calls it ‘my intense typing.’ Her teasing is somewhat true, as I get a lot of information in my head, and start to type fiercely to get it all down. This leads to mistakes and the need for restructuring sentences. Somehow, I am worse on an iPhone today than I was 10 years ago. Not because I forgot how to type, but because the keyboard has decided it’s a co-author - and often not a good one!
I don’t think I’m crazy or my skills are worsening. And, to prove it, I did the research - I found, it’s not just me…
It’s was easy to find a huge increase of other people with similar complaints - articles are everywhere with titles like, ‘the keyboard got “smarter”… and forgot its one job.’ Across Reddit and other social media, there are long rants. Searching on google and AI Perplexity, clearly describes there is an upswing in frustrated mobile auto-correct use. It’s a thing.
Others are running into the same thing - missed taps at high speed, words getting rewritten after you type them, autocorrect confidently “fixing” things that were already correct. And massive complaints on missing the context (like hanging your mother).
It was reassuring to know that many people have experienced auto-correct altering the context of a sentence, such as changing “hanging with my mom” to “hanging her,” with a delay that makes it harder to notice. This is a common issue many have encountered.
What is really silly here, is that AI would write any sentence preferring that someone would rather ‘hang their mother’ vs ‘hanging with their mother.’ Obviously we’re are still in the early stages of AI being helpful, (And more so for all the moms out there. 😜)
Under the hood, it makes sense: More machine learning, more personalization. The keyboard is literally learning how you type. The problem is… sometimes it learns the wrong lessons.
A few typos, some slang, one weird phrase, and suddenly your phone starts overriding perfectly normal sentences like it knows better. Add a bit of lag, a few dropped inputs, and now you’re fighting both the keyboard and its opinion about your writing. My style of writing often is a bit snarky, mixed in with the serious or direct tone = which i’m sure is hard for AI predict.
That’s the real shift.
It’s not just more typos. It’s a system that misinterprets what you wrote, and then aggressively commits to being wrong. And the results of all this new technology helping me write better (this is does), but also can twist it into the wrong context.
So, if you’ve typed a message lately and immediately found it was auto-correcting out of context - you’re not along.
Lastly, this was written on a whim, on a Saturday morning, in a lovely UK cafe next to the river Themes, completely in response after some good natured family teasing of my DM typing failures. So, if you find any typos or out of context sentences or meanings, it wasnt me who may not be in professional mode, or focused to write a professional or quality post, and i’m surly not the one that poorly wrote anything - it was the iPhone marking all the mistakes (can i use that as an excuse from more on? Maybe if that is good and logical, i can use it to explain that last poorly written DM to my mom 😅😉)