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.

  • snooggums
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    292 months ago

    Seems like an obvious defect that should have come up during negative testing.

    • @[email protected]
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      362 months ago

      Bold of you to assume there was any testing process involved beyond “does it run? ship it”

    • @[email protected]
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      162 months ago

      You’d think. If I was the one paying for it, I would be changing providers but you know how that goes. I just work here, man.