On Tuesday, some iPhone users reported Apple’s glitch. They stated that when they used Apple’s voice dictation and said the word “racist,” the system initially typed “Trump.” However, the glitch was inconsistent. The dictation feature sometimes also displayed unrelated words such as “Reinhold” or “you” instead. Moreover, controversy was sparked after gaining attention in a viral TikTok post, leading to questions about Apple’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
Company Statements and Rising Controversies
Apple highlighted that the speech recognition models powering its dictation feature sometimes display an incorrect word with phonetic similarities. However, the company did not explain why its system interpreted “racist” as the name of President Donald Trump.
In response to the controversy, an Apple spokesperson also acknowledged the issue:
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation, and we are rolling out a fix as soon as possible.”
John Burkey, founder of Wonderrush.ai, stated that the issue seemed to have started following an update to Apple’s servers. According to him, a piece of software code within Apple’s systems caused iPhones to display the word “Trump” when users said, “racist.”
“This smells like a serious prank. The only question is: Did someone slip this into the data or slip into the code?”
Trump’s Reaction
The issue arose after Apple announced on Monday a $500 billion investment in U.S. facilities, projects, and infrastructure. An announcement that Trump quickly credited as a victory for his tariff policies. Additionally, earlier this month, Trump introduced a 10% tariff on imports from China, where many of Apple’s products are manufactured.
In an all-caps post on Monday, Trump claimed the investment and thanked Apple CEO Tim Cook:
“Faith in what we are doing, they wouldn’t be investing ten cents.”
However, on Tuesday, Trump criticized Apple in a separate all-caps post after the company’s shareholders rejected a proposal.
Previous Glitches Targeting Trump
In 2018, Siri was involved in another political controversy. It displayed a nude image in response to the question, “Who is Donald Trump?” The issue was traced back to rogue Wikipedia editors who had altered the source of Siri’s information.
In September 2024, Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, faced a similar controversy after a viral video showed it listing reasons to vote for Kamala Harris but declining to do the same for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
Last month, Meta faced criticism after users claimed social platforms favored President Donald Trump and his administration following his inauguration. Many users were alarmed noticing that they appeared to have been automatically subscribed to Trump’s and Vice President JD Vance. However, Meta stated that this was a standard practice during presidential transitions.
In The End
Although Apple maintains that its voice-to-text glitch is purely a technical issue rather than political bias. The controversy has reignited concerns about the influence of artificial intelligence on public discourse. Trump’s election and his signing of numerous executive orders are reversing diversity and inclusion measures in the federal government. Moreover, many tech companies including Google, Amazon, and Meta have similarly scaled back such initiatives.