Multiple users today said when they were using their iPhone’s dictation feature and tried to use the word “racist,” that the word “Trump” momentarily appeared in its place.
In some cases, when the use speaks the word “racist” when using the iPhone’s built-in dictation feature, the device momentarily interprets the word as being “Trump.” The word makes a quick appearance before being autocorrected to the correct work, as Apple’s on-device processing properly interprets what was said.
Just because you say “racist” doesn’t guarantee that you’ll see “Trump” appear. Some publications say they saw other words appear. MacRumors says they also saw “Rhett” and “Rouch” appear before the iPhone corrected the words to racist.
An Apple spokesperson told The New York Times that the issue was due to a “phonetic overlap” between the two words. At this point, we don’t don’t know for sure if this issue existed prior to today and was just now noticed, or if there was some internal change that caused it. Apple said that it is readying on a fix.
Former Apple Siri team member John Burkey, who should be educated on things like this, told The New York Times that there is “probably” code in Apple’s systems that is causing the iPhone to write Trump when someone speaks the word racist. “This smells like a serious prank,” he said, although he wasn’t sure who pulled the prank.
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?”
