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.”

  • Llewellyn@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    Which has the same concept as the LLM under the hood, hasn’t it?

    • DragonTypeWyvern
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      2 months ago

      This isn’t a Large Language Model, it’s a Chonky Linguistic Algorithm.