For today’s Sunday Poser, Sadje wants to know if we think it’s predictive text or AI that we use while writing on our devices.

She also wants to know if predictive text drives you crazy like it does her and if we use autocorrect and predictive text on our device?

My answers to the follow-up questions are easier than my answer to the initial question. Yes, I use both predictive text and autocorrect when composing posts, emails, text messages, etc. It not only doesn’t drive me crazy, for the most part I find it useful.

And it can be kind of fun. Teresa Grabs, the Haunted Wordsmith (remember her), used to have a fun thing — at least I thought it was fun — where she’d ask us to pick a word and then write a 30 – 50 word post using what she called “auto-select,” or what most of us call predictive text.

I tried it out using the word “nonsense” and began using predictive text to see what would happen. I did “cheat” a little, in that the words in italics below were words I used to get the conversation going. Otherwise, what follows is purely uncontrollable nonsense using predictive text for about 90 words.

This is nonsense and it’s not so good. I don’t think we have any questions or comments about the topic. I’m glad you enjoyed the time last night and the day before when you were going on to the next week. Forget about what you mean by the end of this world. Nobody knows how much they have been fooled by the way they have worked with their faith. I don’t have any other choice, but if I’m going through this anyway, I’ll let you know when I’m done.

How was that for a little bit of gobbledegook nonsense? Maybe you might want to have a go at it.

But now back to Sadje’s original question: is predictive text AI? I didn’t know the answer to that, so I went right to the horse’s mouth, so to speak. I asked that question to the ChatGPT app on my iPhone and here’s the response I got:

Yes, predictive text on smartphones utilizes artificial intelligence (Al) techniques. It uses algorithms and machine learning models to analyze the context of your text input and suggest the most likely next word or phrase. These Al models are trained on large amounts of text data to learn patterns and make accurate predictions, which helps improve typing efficiency and speed on mobile devices.

So there you go. The answer is both.