On Tuesday, tech giant Apple announced that it is actively working to solve a glitch with the iPhone’s dictation system where users reportedly said that the name “Trump” briefly appears after saying the word “racist.”
According to Axios, a TikTok video went viral in which a user showcases the glitch. President Donald Trump’s last name briefly appears on-screen, alongside other words that include the consonant “r,” before correcting itself to the word “racist.”
Conservatives and other critics of Big Tech highlighted the video as proof that major tech companies and artificial intelligence (AI) still have issues with left-wing political biases, some of which may be deliberately programmed in by the developers. Apple and other companies have increasingly leaned on AI as a major factor in setting the iPhone apart from other smartphones on the market from competitors such as Google.
Apple’s explanation is that the glitch is the result of dictation technology sometimes displaying words that overlap phonetically, only for further analysis a split-second later to identify the correct word.
“We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” said an Apple spokesman in a statement.
President Trump has had a strained relationship with Big Tech ever since he announced his first presidential campaign in 2015. Years of social media platforms and tech companies suppressing conservative rhetoric culminated in all of the major platforms banning the then-45th President shortly before he left office in January of 2021. He has since been restored to all major social media sites following his comeback victory in 2024, and several prominent tech CEOs – including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos – were present at his second inauguration.
Oh yeah Apple–“Trump” and “racist” sound almost exactly the same–just sound them out. It is a great irony that for all Mr. Trump’s faults (and there may be many) there is no evidence at all that he is a racist. The supreme irony is that others who have unambiguously expressed racist sentiments in public–Mr. Biden’s “racial jungle” and “clean, smart, intelligent African American” comments come immediately to mind–get a complete pass. In early 21st Century American discourse “racist” is perhaps the worst epithet that can be hurled at anyone–and for good reason. It is truly a shame to see the word cheapened by being bandied about in such fashion.