Several iPhone users on Tuesday learned that when they tried to voice-dictate the word “racist” into their phones, the word “Trump” flashed in its place momentarily.
Cowboy State Daily reporters observed the phenomenon on their own phones as well.
Apple vowed to fix the issue, telling media outlets, “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers dictation and we are rolling out a fix today.”
The word “Trump” flashed for other words that sound similar to “racist” – “rampant” and “rampage” - but not nearly as frequently as it did for “racist,” in Cowboy State Daily’s experiments with the phenomenon.
Wyoming’s two U.S. senators, both Republicans, criticized the issue as appalling.
"The recent so-called glitch in Apple’s software is both appalling and alarming," wrote Sen. John Barrasso in a Tuesday email statement to Cowboy State Daily. "It needs to be corrected immediately. Apple owes President Trump and the American people a formal apology.”
Sen. Cynthia Lummis cast the issue as a partisan breach into widely used tech software.
“If Big Tech is allowing such brazenly partisan and fundamentally untrue ‘updates’ to slip into their software, that is not just an egregious oversight but sets a dangerous precedent,” Lummis told Cowboy State Daily in a Tuesday statement.
Rep. Harriet Hageman did not immediately respond to email inquiries.
One Wyoming-based user of X.com, formerly Twitter, took to the keyboard to bash the tweak as well.
“Hey, Tim, wtf is this?” the user asked of Apple CEO Tim Cook, with a video of the phenomenon attached under the post. “If I use speak to text, it tries to change the word ‘racist’ to ‘Trump.”
Because People Keep Saying Racist
It’s unclear if the racist-to-Trump issue was a glitch or a prank. Several media outlets called it a “bug.”
Appleinsider.com theorized Tuesday that the issue stems from so many people calling Trump a racist, and machine-learning algorithms leaning into those prolific patterns.
On-device dictation is run by machine-learning algorithms that rely on pattern matching, says the story.
“In the decade Donald Trump has been in the (political) public eye, there has likely been an increase in the word ‘racist’ appearing near ‘Trump,’” the page reported.
“If the word association occurs enough, it may tilt an algorithm one way,” it adds.
Apple told the New York Times the issue was related to a phonetic overlap between the two words.
John Burkey, founder of Wonderrush.ai, told the outlet it could have been a prank inserted into the system.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
