First of all, the sentences generated using the predicative text on my phone made absolute no sense and was grammatically incorrect. I believe these series of words were stringed together by using my most commonly used vocabulary- not necessarily taking into consideration the meaning of the entire sentence. For example, I must be using the word “way” often after using the word “only”, leading to the suggestion from my phone that I should be using these words one after another. In a way, it reflects my “voice” but the sentences as a whole did not generate a statement that sounded like me.

I see this sort of predicative algorithms in social media sites today, such as Instagram. I’ve recently been searching for a new coffee table for my apartment on Google, Wayfair, IKEA, and other furniture websites. Slowly, the ads on my Instagram feed have begun to show me links to coffee tables from furniture companies that I had not known about. I wondered, where did Instagram get access to this type of data? It is almost scary how accurate predicative algorithms can be with our modern technology. It can be both very convenient but also feel quite intrusive. I think it is always important to question the ethical implications behind using data for predicative purposes, whether it is for simple tasks like buying coffee tables or for more academic purposes using student data for learning analytics.