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.”

  • RamblingPanda@lemmynsfw.com
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    5 days ago

    Microsoft teams has some automatic transcript capabilities that are so hilariously bad, it’s hard to believe Microsoft released it.

    I guess they use the same service.

    • ben@lemmy.zip
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      5 days ago

      It’s super hit or miss, odds are it’s using azure though and not just running a model locally.