Apple AI has something to say about Trump. The AI thinks that Trump and the word ‘racist’ mean the same thing. However, Apple says that it is working to fix it.
Videos shared online show people speaking the word “racist” into the Dictation tool and the AI tool picking the name Trump first. It is sometimes transcribed properly, but other times, it is changed to “Trump” and then quickly changed back to the right word.
Apple hates MAGA and hates Trump.
Voice to text the word "racist" on your iPhone (regardless of app) and "Trump" appears first for a millisecond and then the actual word appears. I do wonder why 🤔 pic.twitter.com/9O2sSQqisJ
— Richard Mixon Jr (@RichardMixonJr) February 25, 2025
The tech giant says its dictation service cannot tell the difference between words that have an “r” in them. An Apple spokesperson said, “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation, and we are rolling out a fix today.”
However, Peter Bell, a speech technology professor at the University of Edinburgh, said that Apple’s explanation of phonetic overlap didn’t make sense because the two words were not close enough for an AI system to get them mixed up.
Is this a genuine mistake?
Speech-to-text recognition models are taught by putting in real-life audio clips and correct transcription of what the people say. They are also taught to understand words in the context of other words. For example, they would know the difference between “cup” and “cut” if they were in the phrase “a cup of tea.”
According to Prof. Peter Bell, it’s not likely that Apple made a real mistake with its data. This is because its English language model would have been trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech, which should make it very accurate. He said that it might be a problem with how AI is trained for less well-resourced languages.
This is not a first for Apple’s AI. It suspended its AI summaries of news headlines after it displayed false notifications on stories. One story was where it said tennis player Rafael Nadal had come out as gay.
Apple has generally been sluggish with its AI. Even though the company has been trying to use AI more, its skills are still a long way behind those of its market competitors, such as OpenAI. In fact, internal tests show that Siri is not nearly as useful as ChatGPT.
According to research done by Apple’s AI section, the company is at least two and a half years behind the market leaders when it comes to generative AI technology. This gap is becoming bigger as rivals speed up the development of their AI solutions. The US market is being pressured to do well, and China’s AI is attempting to take over.
Meanwhile, AI isn’t a big part of Apple’s product appeal. According to a survey by SellCell, 73% of Apple users think AI adds little to no value to the experience. In a separate survey, CNET found that 25% of smartphone owners aren’t interested at all.
However, there is hope that the brand’s strength and reach will help it better position itself in the new AI war.
Apple is making bigger investments than its peers
The tech company is expected to spend a lot of money over the next four years on AI, silicon growth, research and development, and a new 250,000-square-foot factory in Houston, Texas. Based on the bigger picture, Apple’s move seems to have come at a very important time in the race to build AI infrastructure. In fact, on Monday, Apple announced a $500 billion U.S. investment.
This follows Meta’s announcement of its own $65 billion AI infrastructure investment for 2025. It includes plans for a huge 2-gigawatt data centre with room for 1.3 million Nvidia GPUs. Apple’s news comes after Meta’s. Zuckerberg said, “This will be a defining year for AI.” “We’re planning to invest US$60-65bn in capex this year while also growing our AI teams significantly.”
On the other hand, a report from TD Cowen says that Microsoft has now cancelled data centre leases and has also backed off on planned investments in other countries. Other news came out that the company had stopped building its $3.3 billion data centre in Wisconsin. This is despite having previously said it would invest $80 billion in AI-enabled data centres by 2025.
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