When Saying 'Racist' to iPhone Leads to 'Trump'... Intentional or Error Controversy

iPhone Dictation Feature Bug Sparks Controversy
Saying 'Racist' Temporarily Shows 'Trump'
"Simple Error" vs "Deliberate Code"

A bug has sparked controversy in the iPhone's dictation feature, where saying the English word 'racist' is temporarily transcribed as 'Trump' before being corrected to 'racist.' This passage could be read as implying that U.S. President Donald Trump is a racist, leading some to suspect that Apple intentionally embedded this. On the 25th (local time), The New York Times (NYT) reported, "Apple explained that the dictation feature caused the error, but there are also suspicions that someone deliberately planted the code."

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The word 'Trump' appeared not only with this term. When reading 'rampant' and 'rampage,' the text temporarily showed 'Trump' before reverting to the original word, revealing a similar bug. A video capturing this spread on TikTok, intensifying the controversy. Apple responded, "Sometimes the speech recognition model can mistakenly display phonetically overlapping words," adding, "We are aware of the issue with the speech recognition model powering dictation and are distributing a fix."

However, since the bug does not occur with just one word and the problematic words are mainly used by critics of President Trump, suspicions arise that this is not a simple error. It is highly likely that somewhere in Apple's system software code, the word 'racist' was set to convert to 'Trump' upon input.

John Burkey, founder of AI startup WonderRush AI and former member of Apple's voice assistant Siri team, told the NYT, "This issue seems to have started after a recent Apple server update," and criticized, "It smells like a serious prank. Someone may have manipulated this data or secretly embedded a bug in the code."

Coincidentally, this bug began appearing the day after Apple announced it would invest $500 billion (about 714 trillion won) in the U.S. over the next four years. Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed on the 21st, just three days after meeting President Trump, that Apple would build a 250,000 square meter server factory for artificial intelligence (AI) data in Houston. This is interpreted as Apple's response to the Trump administration's pressure to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, given that most Apple devices, including iPhones, are manufactured in China. Regarding this, President Trump said, "If they didn't have faith in what we're doing, they wouldn't have invested a dime," and expressed gratitude to "Tim Cook and Apple."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.