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.”

  • TheBlackLounge@lemm.eeEnglish
    264·
    23 days ago

    Whisper really is a lot better when it works, and it’s free. The problem is that it refuses to produce gibberish or give up when it doesn’t work. You’ll always need an editor.

    • The Assman@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      436·
      22 days ago

      The toaster oven I just invented works much better than a traditional one. It reheats French fries perfectly, you can dehydrate in it, makes succulent roasted chicken, and about 2.5% of the time it burns down your house. You’ll always need to keep an eye on it to make sure that doesn’t happen. Remember though, much better than a traditional one.

      • TheBlackLounge@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        22 days ago

        You need an editor for traditional transcription tools too :) and it’s A LOT more work. They don’t even do punctuation or names.

    • wdx@feddit.orgEnglish
      52·
      22 days ago

      This definition of “better” feels like claiming that a Beeper that’s constantly hooked to power is the perfect alarm because it warns you every time someone is trying to break in - while entirely ignoring that it is just constantly blaring.

      • TheBlackLounge@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        22 days ago

        I use it for generating subtitles. It figures out context, it ignores stuttering, it does punctuation etc. It’s really is just better. With clean audio it transcribes like a human does.

        It does better than other techniques with dirty audio, but when it fails it fails weird, which is the big issue here.