No, Apple isn’t subliminally calling Trump a racist with its iPhone dictation feature

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Mac Support London - SupportPlan > Blog > Articles > No, Apple isn’t subliminally calling Trump a racist with its iPhone dictation feature

Conspiracy theorists believe Apple may be subliminally programming speech-to-text dictation users by briefly showing “Trump” when the word “racist” is said, which is obviously not true.

Two sound waveforms labeled 'Trump' on the left and 'racist' on the right, presenting similar visual patterns against a dark background.

Voice Memos showing the audio waveforms for the spoken words ‘Trump’ and ‘racist’

Machine learning algorithms can be fickle things. Apple’s on-device dictation is still run by machine learning algorithms built with massive data sets trained on user inputs.

The problem with teaching any algorithm anything is that they are very predisposed to relying on pattern matching. In the decade Donald Trump has been in the public eye, there has likely been an increase in the word “racist” appearing near “Trump.”

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