iPhone glitch sees ‘Trump’ appear as ‘racist’ when using key text feature

An iPhone glitch that appears to transcribe the word ‘racist’ as ‘Trump’ has left many people scrambling for answers. Videos shared on social media show people using Apple’s voice-to-text feature. But when some users spoke the word ‘racist,’ the word ‘Trump’ would appear briefly on the screen.

Apple says it is working to fix the bug, which it said is an issue with its dictation service caused by a problem between words with an ‘r’ in them. But an expert in speech recognition, Professor Peter Ball, told Metro that Apple’s explanation is ‘implausible’.

He said: ‘Speech-to-text systems can get confused with similar sounding words. ‘A classic example on BBC live captions was “Old Witch” or “Aldwich” during Margaret Thatcher’s funeral procession. ‘But you don’t need an expert to tell you that Trump and racist don’t sound at all similar.’.

He offered his explanation as to what might have gone wrong and added: ‘The two most likely causes are that there’s been some internal tinkering with the architecture of Apple’s system, presumably by a disaffected insider. ‘Or it could have been what I would call “poisoning” of the data that the AI tool has been trained on.

‘That could theoretically have been caused by the words Trump and racist appearing close together in the training material, but it would have to have got past a lot of safeguards. ‘My hunch would be that an insider was behind it . ‘Apple is very tight-lipped about their speech-to-text technology so it’s hard to know for certain.’.

Apple’s voice-to-text feature works by converting spoken words into text by analysing the sound waves in your voice, identifying patterns and transferring them into written words. This allows people to dictate words into their devices, rather than manually texting them out.

The model is trained by inputting clips of people speaking alongside a transcript. Apple said in a statement: ‘We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today.’. But Conservative commentators online have hit out at the tech giant and accused it of political bias.

Others online have been left pretty amused by the videos that have popped up across TikTok and some tried it out for themselves. Renee Peterson posted: ‘This is insane it also worked for me and I gasped so loud.’. A user called Andrew commented: ‘Someone at Apple is getting fired lmao.’.

Matteo added: ‘This is actually wild. I love it. Thank you to whatever Apple developer added this in.’. Apple has been plagued with other issues in the past including a weird bug that resurfaced deleted photos – including NSFW content. It also withdrew an AI tool earlier this year that made repeated mistakes in its summaries of news headlines.

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