iOS Voice Dictation Bug (?) Briefly Flashes the Word ‘Trump’ When You Say ‘Racist’

Chris Welch, writing at The Verge:

Apple has acknowledged a peculiar bug with the iPhone’s dictation feature that briefly displays “Trump” when someone says the word “racist.” The Verge has been unable to reproduce the issue, but it picked up attention on Tuesday after a video demonstrating the strange substitution went viral on TikTok and other social media.

The company provided a statement to The New York Times and Fox News confirming the bug. “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation, and we are rolling out a fix as soon as possible,” an unnamed spokesperson said, according to Fox News.

From the Times story:

The issue appeared to begin after an update to Apple’s servers, said John Burkey, the founder of Wonderrush.ai, an artificial intelligence start-up, and a former member of Apple’s Siri team who is still in regular contact with the team.

But he said that it was unlikely that the data that Apple has collected for its artificial intelligence offerings was causing the problem, and 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?”

Paul Kafasis (my guest on the latest episode of The Talk Show) captured a video of the glitch in action. I guess it could be a protest prank from a rogue employee, but I suspect it’s just a machine learning glitch — maybe caused by the fact that Trump’s name gets mentioned alongside “racist” so often? It’s definitely a little weird, but all sorts of things about Siri are a little weird.

★ Wednesday, 26 February 2025