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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.”

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[-] wdx@feddit.org 5 points 4 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.ee 2 points 3 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.

this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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