Apple recently faced a bizarre bug in its iPhone dictation feature that’s causing quite a stir online. The issue, which has been making the rounds on social media, shows the word “Trump” briefly appearing when users dictate the word “racist”. This glitch has sparked outrage among conservatives, who are accusing Big Tech of harboring a political bias.

According to Apple, the problem lies in the speech recognition models that power dictation, which sometimes display words with phonetic overlap before correcting themselves. “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” an Apple spokesperson said on Tuesday evening in a statement.

However, experts like Peter Bell, a professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, are skeptical of this explanation, suggesting that it’s unlikely to be a genuine mistake with Apple’s data. Bell believes that the words “Trump” and “racist” are not similar enough to confuse an artificial intelligence (AI) system, and that it’s more likely someone has altered the underlying software.

Bell told BBC that such errors could be possible for less well-researched languages but in this case, “it probably points to somebody that’s got access to the process”.

A former Apple employee who worked on Siri, Apple’s AI assistant, has also weighed in, telling The New York Times that the issue “smells like a serious prank”. 

This glitch highlights the ongoing challenges with artificial intelligence’s accuracy, particularly as companies like Apple rely more heavily on AI to power their features. 

Apple announced yesterday a $500 billion investment in the US over the next four years, which includes a large data centre in Texas for Apple Intelligence.