Apple to fix iPhone dictation bug that replaces word 'racist' with 'Trump'
25 comments
·February 26, 2025beardyw
Not sure why the headline was modified here. If it was "Apple decides to not fix ...." that would be news.
dietsche
on my iphone it briefly displays “you” when i say racist in the imessage app. i’m curious what happens for other people…
josefritzishere
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
CivBase
There's no way this is a bug, right? There is no phonetic overlap between the words "racist" and "Trump", and the political implications seem too obvious for it to be coincidence. Surely this was intentional, even if it wasn't sanctioned by Apple's leadership.
theglenn88_
I feel this could also be Apple collecting common replacements from their customers devices and applying the suggestions to updated dictionaries. They must collect that data from devices, I would have thought.
CivBase
But the point of the feature is to write the words the user dictates, isn't it? So if it correctly recognized the word "racist", why would it replace it with "Trump"? The application must know that's not what the user dictated.
The most likely explanation to me is that Apple probably has a feature which automatically replaces expletives so that users don't accidentally send messages with offensive language that was not intended. It's probably a simple substitution which maps known expletives to suitable replacements. A disgruntled developer probably added this substitution and, for whatever reason, it didn't get caught until it hit production. I don't know if this is true, but it seems like a reasonable explanation to me.
techjamie
It could be something like a small LLM helping the transcription do its job, and because "Trump" and "racist" appear frequently together in online discourse, they're tied closely together in the model.
You can actually get something similar to happen yourself, too, if you transcribe enough text with Whisper. I've had Whisper reword sentences in ways that don't sound like source audio at all, but still work as what someone might actually say.
aithrowawaycomm
The only video I saw of this happening seemed to be in a text conversation where they were previously talking about politics. I don't know how Apple's transcription works but it might have jumped the gun simply because the guy talks about politics a lot + something about his voice.
I see no indication that this is an ubiquitous issue.
CivBase
The embedded TikTok video in the linked article shows someone replicating the issue.
The video showed two attempts, with the issue only occurring on the second attempt. It isn't obvious how many attempts were made before the start of the video. The rest of the text conversation visible in the video did not appear to be political, but it's impossible to say what was discussed before that.
aithrowawaycomm
That is the video I am talking about.
bell-cot
Maybe. Or, maybe the substitution was "hallucinated" by an AI with a poorly-curated training set. And nothing resembling Actual Intelligence - as in human common sense - to realize that the substitution was both a mistake, and a PR disaster for Apple.
techorange
PR disaster seems a bit much. I’m trying to think what I would do if something similar happened to Biden or Kamala and I can’t imagine being moved? I would think the right, being more pro freedom of speech, and pro-comedy would let it go. It’s kind of funny really.
bell-cot
President Trump is neither Biden nor Harris, and is nothing resembling a "free speech" ideological purist. He is an extremely powerful and temperamental man, who is extremely quick to use his power against those who he perceives to be his enemies.
hagbard_c
[flagged]
skyyler
Yes, this was intentional. Most likely it was gnomes inserting it for unknown reasons.
If only we could understand the motives of the gnomes.
InsideOutSanta
Phase 1: Replace "racist" with "Trump"
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: Profit
hagbard_c
If you want to call these activist employees 'gnomes' that is up to you. As to their motives I think you know and I wonder why you feign ignorance. So be it but I think it better to walk around with my eyes open.
techorange
By saying it was intentional are you applying some kind of insider knowledge? Seems like we should wait to judge until we have all of the facts.
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aaron695
[dead]
Many moons ago, I randomly discovered that the built-in text to speech engine on Windows 2000 would pronounce “crotch” as “crow’s nest.” Never found any reference to it online at the time, although today it’s pretty well documented. It’s possible I was one of the first people to find that.
I’m sure it was a bug and not some kind of self-censoring thing, but I had (and still have) no good explanation for it. Language is weird.