Technology

59091 readers

4728 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

384

Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said (apnews.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 week ago

Rather than making it illegal to use, people need to use these tools responsibly. If any of these companies are using almost any kind of AI/machine learning they need to include a human in the loop that can verify that it's working correctly. That way if it starts hallucinating things that were never said, it can be caught and corrected.

I've found that Whisper generally does a better job at translating/transcribing audio than other open source tools out there, so it's not garbage.. But it absolutely is a hazard if you're trying to rely solely on it for official documents (or legal issues).

As far as promotion goes... It's open source software, it's not being sold.