Apple’s dictation system transcribes the word ‘racist’ as ‘Trump’
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An Apple spokesperson blamed the issue on phonetic overlap between the two words.
PHOTO: JUAN ARREDONDO/NYTIMES
Tripp Mickle and Eli Tan
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SAN FRANCISCO – While using Apple’s automatic dictation feature to send messages on Feb 25, some iPhone users reported seeing a peculiar bug: the word “racist” temporarily appearing as “Trump”, before quickly correcting itself.
The message blip, which was replicated several times by The New York Times, provoked controversy after appearing in a viral TikTok post, raising questions about Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
An Apple spokesperson blamed the issue on phonetic overlap between the two words, and said the company was working on a fix.
The issue appeared to begin after an update to Apple’s servers, said Mr John Burkey, founder of AI start-up Wonderrush.ai, and a former member of Apple’s Siri team who is still in regular contact with the team.
But he said it was unlikely that the data that Apple has collected for its AI offerings was causing the problem, and that the word correcting itself was likely an indication that the issue was not just technical. Instead, he said, there was probably software code somewhere on Apple’s systems that caused iPhones to write the word “Trump” when someone said “racist”.
“This smells like a serious prank,” Mr Burkey said. “The only question is: Did someone slip this into the data or slip into the code?”
The issue was the latest stumble at Apple since the company introduced a new AI system in 2024 called Apple Intelligence. In January, the company said it would disable one of the system’s signature capabilities: aggregating and summarising news notifications. It did so after the system inaccurately summarised news headlines from several media outlets.
In 2018, Siri was the centre of another political controversy when the voice assistant displayed a nude image in response to the question: “Who is Donald Trump?” The bug was linked to rogue Wikipedia editors who had changed the source of Siri’s information.
The latest issue started appearing on phones a day after Apple said that it would invest US$500 billion (S$669 billion) in the United States
The investment promise came after Apple chief executive Tim Cook met President Donald Trump last week and said the company would invest hundreds of billions of dollars. It was the latest in a series of meetings between Mr Cook and Mr Trump. Mr Cook also donated US$1 million to Trump’s inauguration and sat on the dais during the swearing-in. NYTIMES
