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.
How is anyone surprised by this? Making shit up is literally all that LLMs do
This isn’t an LLM, but a speech-to-text tool. In my experience it’s really stable while people are talking, but makes things up during periods of silence. A better pipeline might make things better, but I would never use it within a medical context
once again AI is a cool trick your uncle learned in the army and not actual Gandalf level magic
The automated voicemail transcriptions my work uses (medical office) recently switched to AI. In some cases it works really well, but if there are long periods of silence it will start to make things up. I’ve ended up with some pretty loopy messages when someone leaves voicemail with long silence at the end.
Seems like an obvious defect that should have come up during negative testing.
Bold of you to assume there was any testing process involved beyond “does it run? ship it”
I don’t understand how AI keeps getting away at delivering software that does not meet obvious specifications
Same way regular software does.
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.
“I don’t care what the patient said before he went under. They say all kinds of loopy things. The chart clearly says to amputate the right leg. Hand me the bone saw.”
I’m a stenographer. People ask me if I am concerned with AI taking my job and I say notttt yettt.
This is why i don’t trust AI summaries.
Violent rhetoric? “Doctor Johnson recommends punching the patient in his fucking face until he squeals! Now to make pizza get a bottle of Elmer’s glue…”
This is when it invents stuff based on stereotypes and their harmful perpetuating continues.
Fantasy in, fantasy out. Don’t use it if you don’t know this or if you can’t repair its mistakes.
Yes… you already said it was an AI tool?
Digital lying box… That lies to you.
I’m shocked. Shocked!
Well, not that shocked.
Politicians take interest.
