iPhone transcribes the word ‘racist’ as ‘Trump.’ Apple explains why.

Apple is on the defense after iPhone users noticed something weird with Apple’s AI-powered dictation tool.

Over the past 24 hours, videos started to spread across the internet showing iPhone users trying to use Apple’s voice-to-text dictation tool to transcribe the word “racist.” The iPhone would temporarily transcribe “racist” as “Trump” before quickly overwriting the word with the correct dictation.

Tweet may have been deleted

Tweet may have been deleted

As to be expected, President Donald Trump’s supporters were not happy with Apple over the transcription, with conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones suggesting a conspiracy against Trump.

Trump’s supporters are not likely to accept Apple’s explanation either.

Apple says the transcription issue was a phonetic one, a flaw in iPhone’s dictation feature where the tool has trouble with similar sounding words with the letter “R.”

“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement.

Bug or prank?

However, experts and insiders aren’t convinced with Apple’s explanation.

In BBC‘s report, speech technology professor Peter Bell said that Apple’s version of what happened was “just not plausible.” The New York Times spoke to a former Apple employee who had worked on the company’s AI voice assistant Siri who said it seemed more like a “serious prank.” 

While the prank explanation seems plausible, this wouldn’t be the first time that Apple’s AI has gone rogue. Recently, the company had to pull its AI news summaries from the iPhone after the Apple Intelligence-powered feature was providing users with completely false AI-generated headlines.

Mashable attempted to recreate the dictation issue, but it appears Apple has already rolled out its fix.