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Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said (apnews.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.

Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

More concerning, they said, is a rush by medical centers to utilize Whisper-based tools to transcribe patients’ consultations with doctors, despite OpenAI’ s warnings that the tool should not be used in “high-risk domains.”

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 month ago (1 children)

As someone who uses Whisper fairly often, it's obvious that they've trained off of a bunch of YouTube videos.

Most of the time it's very accurate, but there have definitely been a few times in long transcription sessions where it will randomly hallucinate that someone is saying "Don't forget to like and subscribe!" When nothing was said anywhere near that.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's hilarious. I just love how AI is basically like a 6-year-old who weaves his favorite new expressions into everything without fully understanding what they mean.