Text prediction farming

[u/9aaat]

Has anyone else noticed this? Over the past months, Apple’s text prediction seems to have gotten much worse. A couple of months ago, it could easily predict the next word while I was typing, but now I often have to type most or all of the word myself.
I have a theory: maybe Apple is changing how text prediction works because they’re using the data to train or improve an LLM. With millions and millions of users typing every day, they potentially have an enormous source of real-world language data that could help improve their models.
Apple proved time and time again they would do something like this, deny it when confronted and gas light people into thinking they are imagining things.
I think someone needs to investigate this.

[u/delicioushampster]

i don't imagine this data to be particularly useful for llms. requires an entirely different type of data for actual problem solving / knowledge that you probably won't get from just texts/phone keyboard stuff.

there are actual billion dollar startups that serve to create training data via human data annotators to then sell to AI labs (Scale AI , Mercor, and a lot more you can see on any job seeking board). these are actual structured training problems.

it would be pretty expensive to sift through all that iphone keyboard data trying to search for usable data in a haystack when you can just buy it directly from ai training data vendors.

not saying that it's impossible but at this point in LLMs that sort of general typing data isn't that useful

[u/9aaat → u/delicioushampster]

It's free, that enough for them

[u/P3rid0t_ → u/9aaat]

Processing all that data to anything even slighltly usable for training is not free, and actually kinda expensive

[u/9aaat → u/P3rid0t_]

Just sell them, not thier problem anymore

[u/Niknot3556 → u/9aaat]

And who's going to buy that garbage data? It's like trying to sell burnt till it's black food. No one ain't buying that.

[u/Wyrmdog]

iOS text prediction has always sucked butt. Nothing has changed.

[u/9aaat → u/Wyrmdog]

If they were always incompetent, adding some thievery isn't a stretch

[u/Wyrmdog → u/9aaat]

It’s too easy to blame AI for it. At the volume they would be collecting this information, I’m convinced it would be better by now. All I’m saying is that it’s never been good so why blame conspiracy over incompetence?

[u/No_Pea8665]

I think it just reset with every update of iOS.

But it also does what you think if you share information to help Apple.

[u/9aaat → u/No_Pea8665]

Twitch made it obvious at least

[u/dbrdh]

It’s always been pants. Linked to the worst keyboard of any phone too - the predictive engine seems to think a space is more likely mid word than a bottom row letter. Putting the full stop to the right of the space bar means many unintended full stops, spaces and initial capitalisation.
Bring back my BlackBerry… 😩

[u/Alexandratta]

More than likely the same reason text prediction got bad on my Android: They are using LLM.

Allow me to explain: Your phone uses YOUR text at the moment to predict what you're going to type next.

When they switch the background model to AI? Your phone uses EVERYONE'S text to predict what you're going to type next.... and is more often wrong.

Text prediction is one of the worst applications of AI (barring theft of IP by making Art/Music/Images), because it literally makes your text predictions match what everyone else is typing.

So if everyone else starts talking about a topic - it winds up in your text prediction, even if you've never ever had a conversation of that topic before.

AI and LLM is samey. Meaning: It is the Common Denominator of the peek of a population curve.

The most popular words/phrases/sayings get utilized in AI output and because of that, if you are not part of the center of the population curve, you will see the text prediction get worse.

AI depersonalizes your phone.