A scientific conference accepted a 'study' written entirely by iPhone autocomplete

People use iPhones
(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images)

You've probably seen them in your Facebook feed: the amusing sentences your friends got their smartphones to "write" simply by selecting the middle of three suggested words in their phone's autocomplete function over and over. The results rarely make much sense.

But that didn't stop an academic paper written entirely via iPhone autocomplete from being accepted by a scientific conference just three hours after submission. A New Zealand professor named Christoph Bartneck received an invitation to submit a paper to a nuclear physics gathering, but he's not a physicist. So instead he wrote an entire "study" using text predictions on his iPhone. He'd begin a sentence with a word like "atomic" or "nuclear" and let iOS take it from there.

"The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids," his abstract said. Bartneck suspects the conference is not of high academic caliber and will not attend.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.