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.”

  • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    No, we really haven’t had on-device voice recognition that meets any definition of “decent”. Anything reasonable phones out to “the cloud” for decent voice recognition.

    • LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      So? I’d rather have my software talk to a server than be downright wrong just so another business can climb onto the AI bandwagon.

      • Szyler@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        You can’t do that with personal information like the ones doctors needs transcribed. It has to be local.