"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 — know...

[timnitgebru@dair-community.social]

"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.

Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

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

AP News (apnews.com)

[timnitgebru@dair-community.social]

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."

Instead of "urging" OpenAI to "fix" their tools, as people have been doing forever now while handing them billions, why not use transcription tools that are not built by them?

[timnitgebru@dair-community.social]

"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.”"

[alcinnz@floss.social]

@timnitGebru Hang on, we were already using machine learning to do speech transcription before these LLMs. Why did we introduce hallucinations into them?