Apple’s Voice Dictation Reportedly Substitutes ‘Trump’ for ‘Racist’ Due to Speech Recognition Bug

February 25, 2025

Apple's voice dictation on iPhone reportedly replaced the word 'racist' with 'Trump', due to a phonetic overlap in its speech recognition model. The incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices.

The company has acknowledged the bug, committing to an immediate fix. This raises questions about the need for trustworthy AI governance—an area where Project Cerebellum is dedicated to providing insights and resources.
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Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.616, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.607, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.604, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: apple
Alleged developer: apple
Alleged harmed parties: apple-users, donald-trump

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/952

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.