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.
How is anyone surprised by this? Making shit up is literally all that LLMs do
This isn’t an LLM, but a speech-to-text tool. In my experience it’s really stable while people are talking, but makes things up during periods of silence. A better pipeline might make things better, but I would never use it within a medical context