Apple's Dictation System Transcribes the Word 'Racist' as 'Trump'

by cwmartinon 2/25/2025, 9:41 PMwith 23 comments

by xnxon 2/26/2025, 2:44 PM

I'm guessing this is a result of these two concepts not being far from each other in vector space? Like a data-driven version of "miserable failure" Google Bombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing

by cozzydon 2/26/2025, 12:07 AM

Sounds like a bug where they got it the wrong way around

by mirawelneron 2/25/2025, 11:08 PM

People resorting to protest via causing inconvenience. Which is probably one of the more effective forms of protest anyways.

by wazdraon 2/25/2025, 10:54 PM

https://archive.ph/2rVhO

by Aloisiuson 2/26/2025, 5:48 PM

I haven't been able to reproduce this. It correctly transcribes racist as racist.

by acdhaon 2/26/2025, 1:41 AM

This smells like an LLM trying to correct the output of a speech recognition system. I said the word “racist” repeatedly and got this unedited output. You could see it changing the text momentarily after the initial recognition result, and given the way Mamaroneck sounds nothing like either of the other words I’d bet this thing was trained on news stories:

“Racist, Trump, Mamaroneck racist Trump Mamaroneck, racist racist racist racist Trump Mamaroneck”

by rezaprimaon 2/25/2025, 11:36 PM

I would immediately find other alternatives that have better accuracy

by irusenseion 2/26/2025, 12:07 PM

Silly idiotic activism aside it's concerning that if someone working at Apple managed to slip in such a bold change into the OS then can a malicious group do the same?