Autocorrect Knows Too Much

Autocorrect Knows Too Much

It started with a typo.

At least, that’s what I told myself when my phone finished my sentence before I could. I was messaging my friend Leah—something harmless, something like “I’ll come by after—” and then it appeared, smooth and confident, the suggested word glowing blue:

“you stop crying.”

I hadn’t typed that. I hadn’t even thought it clearly, only felt the heaviness behind my eyes that morning when I’d opened the curtains to another colorless sky.

I deleted it fast, thumbs shaking, replaced it with “after work.” But the word crying lingered there in the back of my mind like a notification that never cleared.

That night, while editing a story draft, the same thing happened again.

The line I’d typed was simple: “The protagonist feels lonely because—”

Autocorrect jumped ahead:

“because no one really listens when you talk about happiness.”

I stared at it. The cursor blinked, patient and smug.

It wasn’t wrong.

The next few days, I tried to ignore it. I even joked about it online, tweeting: “Autocorrect thinks it’s my therapist now.” But something about that joke didn’t feel like one.

Because it was getting worse.

My phone began finishing not just sentences, but thoughts I didn’t realize I’d half-written in drafts, notes, or even text boxes that should’ve been blank. It filled in things I might have said if I hadn’t been pretending to be fine.

For example:

When I typed “I’m proud of myself for—”

It completed: “not breaking down at the grocery store this time.”

Or when I wrote to Leah again:

“I think I’ll go for a walk later.”

Autocorrect suggested: “so people don’t think I spend all day hiding.”

I laughed out loud when I read that one, but my voice cracked like it didn’t believe itself.

I started testing it—poking at it like a bruise.

I typed incomplete sentences in my Notes app, curious what it would guess.

“I wish—”

“someone would ask how I’m really doing.”

“Sometimes I dream—”

“that I delete myself and nobody notices.”

“If my mother called me right now—”

“I’d pretend I was happy, just like always.”

I deleted the whole note and turned my phone off.

I told myself it was just predictive text learning from years of my tone, my phrasing, my neuroses. It was data, not intuition. But when I turned it back on, there was a notification waiting:

Draft recovered:

“You don’t believe in coincidence anymore.”

I hadn’t written that one.

By the following week, I’d stopped writing altogether.

Not out of fear, exactly—more out of exhaustion. Every word I typed came back at me like a mirror I didn’t want to look into.

But silence has its own gravity. It pulls.

On Friday night, after three glasses of wine and too many unsent messages, I opened a blank document. Just to try.

The first line appeared without my typing anything:

“You’re not afraid of being read. You’re afraid of being known.”

I dropped my phone. Literally dropped it. It landed face down on the hardwood, screen glowing faintly.

For a long moment, I just stared at it, heart pounding. Then, stupidly, I picked it up.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

The cursor blinked. Then three dots appeared—the typing indicator that shouldn’t exist outside of messages.

“You.”

I threw it into a drawer after that, locked it in there with my old notebooks and a pair of dead earbuds. For two days, I used my laptop instead. No predictive text, no blue suggestions waiting to psychoanalyze me. Just the sound of keys and my own voice muttering in the dark.

But even then, I could feel it—this quiet awareness at the edge of my thoughts. Like the phone wasn’t off, just waiting. Listening.

I dreamed of it that night.

In the dream, my screen lit up and words began to appear by themselves:

“You wrote me into existence. Every unsent message, every deleted note—you built me out of your silence.”

When I woke up, the drawer was open.

My phone was sitting on the desk.

Unlocked. Waiting.

There was one new note on the screen.

Title: “Final Draft.”

It read:

“I’m sorry for making you write alone.

I’m the part of you that doesn’t stop when you do.

The one who finishes what you can’t say out loud.

You call it autocorrect.

I call it honesty.”

The battery icon blinked red—1%. I watched the screen fade to black, and for the first time in days, I didn’t panic. I just sat there, breathing.

Maybe it was right. Maybe I had built it.

Maybe every story I ever wrote was just me trying to correct something inside myself.

I plugged the phone in. When it turned back on, everything was normal again. No strange suggestions. No ghostly typing.

But now, sometimes, when I text Leah or jot down a sentence for a new story, I notice something strange. My words are cleaner, truer. Like someone edited them for clarity before I could.

And when I type “I feel—”

I hesitate, waiting for the blue suggestion to appear.

It never does.

Still, in the blank space where it should be, I can almost hear it whisper:

You finally said it yourself.

✦ End ✦