Donald Trump AI video: What is the Apple voice-to-text glitch and is it a prank?

It is the Apple ‘glitch’ that has sparked a series of viral videos surrounding Donald Trump that, even by the level of controversy typically attached to the US president, is remarkable.

The technological anomaly has meant those using Apple’s voice-to-text feature have seen “Trump” appear briefly onscreen when the user has said the word “racist”.

So why exactly has the glitch occurred? Here is what The Scotsman knows.

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington | AP

How was the Apple ‘Trump’ bug found?

A number of iPhone users spotted the bug, with some posting clips to social media of the glitch in action.

The videos themselves have subsequently sparked outrage among supporters of the US president.

The bug appears when users activate the iPhone’s voice-to-text feature, which allows people to dictate messages using their voice.

Users are briefly shown the name “Trump” in response to saying the word “racist”, before quickly correcting to what was said. Some videos posted online show the bug does not appear every time the word racist is said.

What has Apple said about the glitch?

In response, Apple has said it was aware of the issue and was rolling out a fix.

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The iPhone maker said that sometimes its speech recognition models that power the voice dictation tool may first display words with some phonetic overlap until further analysis of what has been said allows it to land on the correct word the user said.

The company said the bug had caused “Trump” to be suggested erroneously in response to several words that include an “r” consonant.

"We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today," an Apple spokesperson said.

What have others said about the Apple glitch?

Some conservative commentators online have accused the tech giant of political bias.

The incident comes at a time of high political tension in the US following Mr Trump’s return to the White House, with social media users accusing platforms of bias towards both Republicans and Democrats in the wake of his election.

Last month, Meta was accused of boosting the profiles of Mr Trump and others in his administration following his inauguration.

After some users complained they had apparently automatically followed the president and Vice-President JD Vance’s new pages, the tech giant quickly confirmed this was because the accounts in question were linked to their political office and not the individual, so changed hands following the presidential transition.

This meant that if users had followed them during the previous administration, they were still following them after the transition.

Is the Apple glitch a prank?

Peter Bell, professor of speech technology at the University of Edinburgh, has told the BBC the explanation provided by Apple for the glitch is "just not plausible”.

He instead suggested it was a more likely scenario someone may have altered the software used by the Apple voice-to-text tool. "It probably points to somebody that's got access to the process,” Prof Bell said.

Speech-to-text recognition models are typically created by putting clips of real people into the software speaking alongside an accurate transcript of what they say.

The New York Times meanwhile reported it had been told by a former Apple employee who worked on its AI assistant Siri: "This smells like a serious prank."