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.”

  • sbvEnglish
    85·
    1 month ago

    Some examples

    In this example, the speaker said, “as the um, the, her father dies not too long after he remarried….” while the program transcribes that as " It’s fine. It’s just too sensitive to tell. She does die at 65….”

    In this example, the speaker said, “and after she got the telephone he began to pray” while the program transcribes that as “I feel like I’m going to fall. I feel like I’m going to fall, I feel like I’m going to fall….”

    • Sludgehammer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      63·
      1 month ago

      Wow, that’s bad. I thought it would be more of a “confusing a sentence for a similar sounding one” type thing but from the above and the article it’s just generating semi-believable text and sticking them into the transcriptions.

      • TheBlackLounge@lemm.eeEnglish
        261·
        1 month ago

        It’s actually extremely good at figuring out confusing text. It gets weird when the audio quality is bad.

        I use it for generating subs for obscure movies.

        • tehn00bi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          1 month ago

          No one is good with bad audio. My wife did some transcription work for a little while, it can be pretty painful, especially for doctors, and all the medical terms.

    • BluesF@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      1 month ago

      This one was wild:

      In an example they uncovered, a speaker said, “He, the boy, was going to, I’m not sure exactly, take the umbrella.”

      But the transcription software added: “He took a big piece of a cross, a teeny, small piece … I’m sure he didn’t have a terror knife so he killed a number of people.”

      From picking up and object to mass murder lmao. Not even close!

      • sbvEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        But it gets the spirit right

        /s

    • JeeBaiChow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 month ago

      Sounds less like transcribing word for word, and more like attempting to summarize and parse meaning on the fly. AIS have notoriously little grasp on reasoning and logic, so it’s interesting how the output holds up in a court of law.