Researchers Say AI Tool Used in Hospitals Invents Things No One Ever 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.

[…] It’s impossible to compare Nabla’s AI-generated transcript to the original recording because Nabla’s tool erases the original audio for “data safety reasons,” Nabla’s chief technology officer Martin Raison said.