While sending messages using Apple's automatic dictatorization feature on Tuesday, some iPhone users reported seeing a distinctive bug. The word “racist” is temporarily displayed as “trump.”
Message Blip, which was replicated several times by the New York Times, sparked controversy after appearing in the Viral Tiktok post, raising questions about Apple's artificial intelligence capabilities.
An Apple spokesperson condemned the issue of voice overlap between the two words and said the company is working on fixing it.
The issue appeared to have started after an Apple server update, said John Burkey, founder of Wonderrush.ai, a former member of Apple's Siri team, an artificial intelligence startup and a regular contact with the team.
However, he said it is unlikely that the data Apple has collected to provide artificial intelligence is causing problems, and that the word fix is likely to indicate that the problem is not technical. Instead, he said there was software code somewhere on Apple's system that probably caused someone to write the word “trump” when they said “racist.”
“This smells like a serious prank,” Burkey said. “The only question is whether someone will let this slide into the data or slip into the code.”
This issue has been the latest stumbling at Apple since introducing a new AI system called Apple Intelligence last year. Last month, the company said it would disable aggregation and summaries of news notifications, one of the system's signature features. It did so after the system inaccurately summarizing news headlines from several media.
In 2018, Ciri was at the heart of another political controversy when voice assistants displayed nude images in response to the question, “Who is Donald Trump?” This bug was linked to the Rogue Wikipedia editor who changed Siri's source.
The latest issue began appearing on mobile phones on the day when Apple said it would invest $500 billion in the US over the next four years. The company said it will begin manufacturing AI servers at its new 250,000-square-foot facility in Houston next year.
The investment promise was that after Apple's CEO Tim Cook met with President Trump last week, the company said it would invest hundreds of millions of dollars. It was the latest in a series of meetings between Cook and Trump. Cook also donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration and sat on Day while he was sworn in.
