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Many users of Apple’s (AAPL-2.90%) iPhone reported facing a bug on Tuesday when the company’s auto-dictation feature typed “Trump” when asked to transcribe the word “racist”.
The bug caught public attention following a viral TikTok from last week, and was replicated by the New York Times (NYT-0.47%). The video posted on TikTok shows that the glitch did not occur every single time and lasted for a few seconds before reverting to the correct spelling.
The cause behind the bug is uncertain as of now, although Apple officials initially blamed “phonetic overlap” between the two words and said they were issuing a fix.
The issue drew ire and concern on social media as Apple amps up its artificial intelligence push.
On Monday, the company announced a $500 billion commitment to invest in the United States over the next four years, with a bulk of the investments to be made in domestic manufacturing and A.I.
Although the official announcement did not mention President Donald Trump, the move was taken as yet another symbol of CEO Tim Cook’s attempts to curry favor with the President. Cook was one of numerous tech executives who attended the President’s inauguration last month, following a $1 million donation to the event.
The latest auto-dictation bug isn’t Apple’s first mishap involving AI and Trump. During Trump’s first presidential term, Apple’s voice assistant Siri sparked controversy after displaying the image of a penis in response to the prompt “Who is Donald Trump?” Siri draws information from the public-sourced Wikipedia, which was to blame in this instance after some users edited Trump’s page to display the nude photograph.