In this week’s Sunday Reboot, an exploration of Apple’s expletives and transcripts that are one step closer to an episode of “Black Mirror.”
Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories in Apple’s reality-warping space from the past seven days. All to start next week with a good first step.
He’s not big, but he’s smart
A list of words and phrases that the iPhone simply won’t recommend to you was released Friday. Thousands of sentence fragments and words that can and will cause offense.
Words that Apple would avoid suggesting as the next word in the sentence you are currently creating.
Of course, as someone who spends my life on the Internet, I couldn’t help but check it out. I will gladly accept the charges of being a minor.
From AppleInsider has standards to meet when it comes to writing about things, there’s no way to directly copy and paste much of what’s in the suggestion list. This applies to both words and sentences.
I appreciate being able to put my words on this site too much to do that.
Swearing can be funny and sometimes educational.
Unfortunately, as a British citizen who has seen too much of the internet in a lifetime, I’m not shocked by what appears in the lists. I had expectations of lists that I would be aware of but find trivial, and I was right.
I also had the expectation that there were phrases on the list that definitely deserved to be there for painfully obvious reasons.
It was also educational, not only in the breadth of cursing and profanity beyond my imagination, but also in the way it is organized.
Let’s take the two favorite “bombs” of the “F” and “C” type.
In the full list of phrases, F-bombs appear in some form more than 100 times in the list of phrases that won’t be suggested. In the Word Tags list, the term appears 93 times in total, including in a word like tmesis.
In contrast, C-bombs are much fewer in number. In the single word list it appears in only five lists and only three times in sentences.
For me this is very surprising, as I can definitely come up with many more sentences using this term. I can come up with even more F-bomb sentences that weren’t included, but really should have been.
The way Apple managed to create the list is such that it avoids the so-called “Scunthorpe problem”. This refers to online systems that block words in a filter due to a string or substring of letters that is itself blocked.
It seems that Apple prefers to define the list of offensive terms to include variations, rather than eliminate every instance of expletives appearing mid-word.
The method is far from all-encompassing, but at least it is executed intelligently.
My story in a pot
The iOS 27.3 developer beta brought with it a new Apple Intelligence feature, under the Audio Intelligence banner. Siri Recaps and Live Rewind were introduced during the September event as a way to aid your daily life, or at least help you refresh your memory via personal surveillance.
Using an Apple Watch Ultra 4 or Apple Watch Series 12, the wearable devices will listen to your conversations with other people. For privacy reasons, it will transcribe 15 seconds at a time, downloading the recording and saving the transcript for later, with Secure Enclave also ignoring the identities of individual speakers.
The result is the creation of features like Live Rewind, which displays the last 15 seconds of transcribed text. Then there’s Siri Recaps which will listen to an entire conversation and give you a summary of what was said.
As we found, it was pretty good at keeping track of what was said, albeit with some slight issues. In one illustrated example, a conversation about housing was completed and followed by details of a drunken brawl and excitement over a Zelda game rework.
A summary of a discussion, produced by Siri listening.
The details are a little jarring but make sense considering the larger conversation, rather than a one-paragraph summary. If the main conversation was about a primary topic, secondary conversations about something completely unrelated deserve only a mention and not much detail.
It was also discovered that foul language was not included in Siri Recap, even though it was censored. Of course, it doesn’t capture quotes, so this kind of thing isn’t necessary.
The good thing is that it’s not something that can really be used as a recording for legal purposes. It’s difficult to use an AI that creates a summary from a transcript, itself based on a buffer that lives for 15 seconds at a time, as a form of serious evidence.
It’s not the common equivalent of police bodycams. At the same time, it’s not even that far away.
Remember that Apple is creating smart glasses and AirPods with cameras, which could do the same thing, but with a view of the world. Once again, Apple’s need to conserve storage capacity and protect privacy will mean it has a future for such incomplete summaries of what happened.
It’s not a world I particularly like the idea of living in. It feels a few steps away from “The Whole Story of You,” an early episode of the dystopian sci-fi show “Black Mirror.”
In the episode, the company uses a “bead” to record what people see and hear, which can then be used to recall and review memories.
I understand that it was written at a time when increased storage was expected to continue at a rapid pace, at some point allowing for the existence of something like McGuffin wheat. So far, the AI industry is making this impossible.
In the show, the protagonist ends up down a rabbit hole thanks to wheat. He continues to review his life and his relationship, with the obsession destroying his life in the process.
We’re a long way from that point, but even in its current simple form, it’s something that could easily lead to a similar scenario. Even if you don’t get all the details of a conversation, and with occasional slips and misunderstood items, you still get enough to form an opinion in hindsight.
It’s bad enough that the internet never forgets. I wonder if we really need our iPhones to do the same.
Last week’s Sunday Reboot talked about OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his belief that memory is wasted in your Mac. It really should be part of the Big Global-Industrial Machine of Artificial Intelligence.
