The Download: autocorrect’s surprising origins, and how to pre-bunk electoral misinformation
—This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, published on May 28 by The MIT Press. It has been lightly edited.
When a young Chinese man sat down at his QWERTY keyboard in 2013 and rattled off an enigmatic string of letters and numbers, his forty-four keystrokes marked the first steps in a process known as “input” or shuru.
Shuru is the act of getting Chinese characters to appear on a computer monitor or other digital device using a QWERTY keyboard or trackpad.
The young man, Huang Zhenyu, was one of around 60 contestants in the 2013 National Chinese Characters Typing Competition. His keyboard did not permit him to enter these characters directly, however, and so he entered the quasi-gibberish string of letters and numbers instead: ymiw2klt4pwyy1wdy6…
But Zhenyu’s prizewinning performance wasn’t solely noteworthy for his impressive typing speed—one of the fastest ever recorded. It was also premised on the same kind of “additional steps” as the first Chinese computer in history that led to the discovery of autocompletion. Read the rest of the excerpt here.
If you’re interested in tech in China, why not check out some of our China reporter Zeyi Yang’s recent reporting (and subscribe to his weekly newsletter China Report!)
+ GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites. The problem, which is likely due to inadequate data cleaning, could lead to hallucinations, poor performance, and misuse. Read the full story.
+ Why Hong Kong is targeting Western Big Tech companies in its ban of a popular protest song.
+ Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business. People are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away. Read the full story.
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