Apple AI Transcription Allegedly Inserts Explicit Language into Scottish Woman’s Voicemail

March 5, 2025

An incident involving a voicemail transcription error by Apple's AI system is raising concerns about the need for trustworthy AI. The system allegedly misinterpreted a standard business message from Lookers Land Rover in Motherwell, Scotland, to 66-year-old customer Louise Littlejohn, inserting an explicit phrase and an insult into the text version of the voicemail. This serves as a reminder about the importance of safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping responsible AI governance, consider joining Project Cerebellum and exploring our HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) to address incidents such as this.

JOIN US

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.612, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.607, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 4.2 — similarity 0.588, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: lookers-land-rover, apple
Alleged developer: apple
Alleged harmed parties: louise-littlejohn, lookers-land-rover, lookers-land-rover-customers, apple-customers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/981

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.