The New York Times is reporting on a viral problem with Apple’s voice-to-text dictation feature, where some users have found that saying the word “Racist” causes the dictation to instead type “Trump,” which then corrects itself to the word “Racist” after a moment.
A TikTok video showing the phenomenon is a week old, but others have shared similar stories. The New York Times claims it was able to replicate the problem several times; Macworld editors have not been able to.
Apple told the NYT that the problem was caused by “phonetic overlap between the two words,” and said Apple is working on a fix. That feels somewhat incredulous, as the two words do not sound very phonetically similar and there are certainly other words it could change to that are more similar. It also doesn’t explain why it changes back.
According to John Burkey, an AI developer who used to be on the Siri team at Apple and is still in contact with old colleagues, the problem began with an update to Apple’s AI servers. He says the fact that the word auto-corrects itself makes it seem as though it’s not bad training data, it’s deliberate code. He thinks it sounds like a very serious prank, something deliberately slipped into either the data or the code.
This is a very public embarrassment for a company that has been in Trump’s sights as president, and has gone out of its way to ingratiate itself to the Trump administration, with Tim Cook donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and even sitting up on the dais with other VIPs as he was sworn in.