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.”

    • Eheran@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      Odd that GPT (and of course all the LLMs too) only got better so far…

      • TheBlackLounge@lemm.ee
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        24 days ago

        The architecture changed, there is still progress to be made there. But LLMs will forever be stuck in 2021, all data afterwards is tainted. Not a lot has been added.

        In fact, Whisper was developed to transcribe videos for more training data, because they ran out of text data. These bad transcriptions are in newer models.