Whisper is a popular transcription tool powered by artificial intelligence, but it has a major flaw. It makes things up that were never said.

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.”

  • @[email protected]English
    16•2 months ago

    This one was wild:

    In an example they uncovered, a speaker said, “He, the boy, was going to, I’m not sure exactly, take the umbrella.”

    But the transcription software added: “He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece … I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people.”

    From picking up and object to mass murder lmao. Not even close!