Apple AI Tool Mistakenly Transcribes ‘Racist’ as ‘Trump’: What This Means for AI Accuracy

Apple is working on a fix for its speech-to-text tool. Users on social media had noticed a quirky glitch: when they said “racist,” their iPhones often typed out “Trump.”

Apple believes this confusion comes from how its tool processes words that start with “r.”

“We know about the issue with Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” said an Apple spokesperson.

But an expert in speech recognition finds this reasoning hard to believe.

Peter Bell, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, speculates that someone might have modified the software instead.

Videos online show users trying out the Dictation feature. Sometimes it works correctly, but other times it mistakenly writes “Trump” before fixing itself.

The BBC could not reproduce this error, indicating Apple’s update may have already taken effect.

Prof. Bell argues that Apple’s idea of phonetic overlap doesn’t hold up, as the two words aren’t similar enough to cause confusion in AI systems.

To train speech-to-text models, engineers use actual voice recordings paired with correct transcripts. This teaching helps the AI understand context, like telling “cup” apart from “cut” in a sentence.

Since Apple’s English model is trained on vast amounts of speech data, it should be quite accurate. For languages with less training data, issues can arise. However, in this case, it seems like someone’s tampering is a stronger likelihood.

A former Apple employee who worked on Siri commented to the New York Times, saying, “This smells like a serious prank.”

Last month, Apple had to roll back another AI feature after complaints from news organizations like the BBC.

The company had to pause its AI-generated news summaries after they circulated incorrect stories, including a claim that tennis star Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.

Recently, Apple announced plans to invest $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. This includes building a large data center in Texas to bolster its AI capabilities.

Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, mentioned that they might also need to rethink their diversity policies in light of recent statements by former President Trump regarding such initiatives.