While using Apple's automatic dictation function to send messages on Tuesday, some iPhone users reported that they had seen a peculiar bug: the word 'racist' that temporarily appeared as 'Trump' before he quickly corrected himself.
The message Blip, which was replicated several times by the New York Times, caused controversy after appearing in a viral Tiktok post and raised questions about Apple's artificial intelligence options.
An Apple spokeswoman blamed the problem of the phonetic overlap between the two words and said the company was working on a solution.
The issue seemed to start after an update of Apple's servers, said John Burkey, the founder of Wonderrush.ai, an artificial intelligence start-up and a former member of the Siri team of Apple who still has regular contact with the team .
But he said it was unlikely that the data that Apple collected for the offer of artificial intelligence caused the problem, and the word that himself corrected was probably an indication that the problem was not only technical. Instead, he said, there was probably software code somewhere on Apple's systems who made sure that iPhones wrote the word “Trump” when someone said “racist.”
“This smells like a serious joke,” said Mr. Burkey. “The only question is: did someone slip into the data or slip into the code?”
The problem was the last stumbling at Apple since the company introduced a new AI system called Apple Intelligence last year. Last month the company said it would disable one of the characteristic possibilities of the system: aggregating and summarizing news reports. It did this after the system had summarized inaccurate news heads from different media.
In 2018, Siri was the center of another political controversy when the voting assistant showed a nude image as an answer 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 last song started on telephones a day after Apple said it would invest $ 500 billion in the United States for the next four years. The company said it would start with producing AI servers in a new facility of 250,000 square feet in Houston next year.
The investment promise came after Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, met President Trump last week and said that the company would invest hundreds of billions of dollars. It was the last in a series of meetings between Mr. Cook and Mr. Trump. Mr. Cook also donated $ 1 million to the inauguration of Mr. Trump and sat on stage while cursing.
