Apple’s new GIF keyboard keeps pulling up sexy My Little Ponies and hardcore porn

Recognizing that 80 percent of all human communication now occurs in the form of looping videos of crying babies and Captain Picard palming his own face, Apple recently accommodated the meme-lovers of the world by including a built-in GIF keyboard for its just-released iOS 10. But, as with any new piece of tech, Apple’s new offering came with a couple of built-in bugs. Or built-in My Little Pony porn and live-action fellatio, in this particular case.

As reported (in graphic detail, so be careful if you’re at work) by Deadspin, the company’s GIF system—which seems to work by doing an image search of popular animated image databases—has been occasionally popping out hardcore porn as a suggestion for what you might want to send to your professional colleagues or dear, sainted mom. To be fair, Apple anticipated at least some of these more prurient requests—outright blocking words like “boobs” or “penis” from its search terms—but it clearly underestimated the depravity of the online human. For one thing, until this morning, “butt” wasn’t in the dictionary of verboten words, leading at least one user to discover an image of My Little Pony character Fluttershy revealing how magical friendship can get.

They also didn’t think to block “huge”—a veritable minefield of oversized primary and secondary sexual characteristics, even with Google SafeSearch firmly on—causing at least a few users to bring up images of enthusiastic-looking oral sex when they just wanted, like, a picture of a really big dog. The problem seems to stem from the fact that iOS isn’t doing any kind of more nuanced filtering of its GIF library, so any objectionable images that aren’t outright labeled as porn keep getting through. The company has since banned both terms, but we can only assume that there are more out there, yet unrevealed, forcing Apple into a game of Whack-A-Porn that nobody’s going to win.

 
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