While using Apple’s automatic dictation feature to send messages on Tuesday, some iPhone users reported seeing a peculiar bug: the word “racist” temporarily appearing as “Trump,” before quickly correcting itself.
The message blip, which was replicated several times by The New York Times, provoked controversy after appearing in a viral TikTok post, raising questions about Apple’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
An Apple spokeswoman blamed the issue on phonetic overlap between the two words, and said the company was working on a fix.
The issue appeared to begin after an update to Apple’s servers, said John Burkey, the founder of Wonderrush.ai, an artificial intelligence start-up, and a former member of Apple’s Siri team who is still in regular contact with the team.
But he said that it was unlikely that the data that Apple has collected for its artificial intelligence offerings was causing the problem, and the word correcting itself was likely an indication that the issue was not just technical. Instead, he said, there was probably software code somewhere on Apple’s systems that caused iPhones to write the word “Trump” when someone said “racist.”
“This smells like a serious prank,” Mr. Burkey said. “The only question is: Did someone slip this into the data or slip into the code?”
The issue was the latest stumble at Apple since the company introduced a new A.I. system last year called Apple Intelligence. Last month, the company said it would disable one of the system’s signature capabilities: aggregating and summarizing news notifications. It did so after the system inaccurately summarized news headlines from several media outlets.
In 2018, Siri was the center of another political controversy when the voice assistant displayed a nude image in response to the question: “Who is Donald Trump?” The bug was linked to rogue Wikipedia editors who had changed the source of Siri’s information.
The latest issue started appearing on phones a day after Apple said that it would invest $500 billion in the United States over the next four years. The company said it would begin manufacturing A.I. servers at a new 250,000-square-foot facility in Houston next year.
The investment promise came after Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, met with President Trump last week and said the company would invest hundreds of billions of dollars. It was the latest in a series of meetings between Mr. Cook and Mr. Trump. Mr. Cook also donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration and sat on the dais during the swearing-in.
