“Phonetic Overlap”
Tripp Mickle and Eli Tan (Hacker News, MacRumors):
While using Apple’s automatic dictation feature to send messages on Tuesday, some iPhone users reported seeing a peculiar bug: the word “racist” temporarily appearing as “Trump,” before quickly correcting itself.
The message blip, which was replicated several times by The New York Times, provoked controversy after appearing in a viral TikTok post, raising questions about Apple’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
An Apple spokeswoman blamed the issue on phonetic overlap between the two words, and said the company was working on a fix.
[…]
“This smells like a serious prank,” Mr. Burkey said. “The only question is: Did someone slip this into the data or slip into the code?”
Speaking the word racist with dictation doesn’t always show “Trump” first, though it did show up more often than other words in our testing. We also saw “Rhett” and “Rouch” appear before the iPhone corrects to racist.
The New York Times story cleverly omits the fact that other words like “rampage” trigger this glitch, not just “racist.” This leads some credence to Apple’s explanation that this is due to “phonetic overlap.”
Except that there is a lot of overlap with “rampage.” There are a variety of possible explanations, from a prank to some sort of semantic adjacency in a training dataset, but I think the idea that it’s because the phonemes are similar is laughable. I wonder why Apple PR felt the need to give this specific explanation instead of just saying that it was a bug.
Previously:
