An elderly Scottish woman was left stunned after Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) left her a profanity-laced message. Louise Littlejohn, 66, from Dunfermline had received a voicemail from the Lookers Land Rover garage in Motherwell, who were inviting her to an event. Unfortunately, Apple’s AI-powered voice-to-text transcription service butchered the translation and mistakenly inserted vulgar sexual references.
The resultant iPhone text referred to Ms Littlejohn as a “piece of s**t” while asking if she had been “able to have sex”.
“Just be told to see if you have received an invite on your car if you’ve been able to have sex. Keep trouble with yourself that’d be interesting you piece of s**t give me a call,” read the jumbled text on her iPhone.
The Scotswoman thought it was a scam but after recognising the call’s zip code, figured out that she had bought a car from the garage some time ago.
“Initially I was shocked – astonished – but then I thought that is so funny. The text was obviously quite inappropriate,” Ms Littlejohn told BBC.
“The garage is trying to sell cars, and instead of that they are leaving insulting messages without even being aware of it. It is not their fault at all.”
According to experts, the Apple AI tool may have struggled with the worker’s thick Scottish accent or the background noise at the garage.
Notably, Apple has been struggling with its tech in recent months. A few weeks ago, the tech giant said it was fixing its speech-to-text tool after social media users pointed out that Donald Trump’s name was typed out when they spoke the word “racist” into their iPhones.
In January, the Cupertino-based company suspended its AI summaries of news headlines after it started displaying false notifications on stories.
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Chatbot gone rogue
This is not the first instance when AI chatbots have seemingly gone rogue. In November last year, Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, threatened a student in Michigan, USA, by telling him to ‘please die’ while assisting with the homework.
“This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth,” the chatbot told Vidhay Reddy, a graduate student, as he sought its help for a project.