<
https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-health-business-90020cdf5fa16c79ca2e5b6c4c9bbb14>
"SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — 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.”
The full extent of the problem is difficult to discern, but researchers and
engineers said they frequently have come across Whisper’s hallucinations in
their work. A University of Michigan researcher conducting a study of public
meetings, for example, said he found hallucinations in eight out of every 10
audio transcriptions he inspected, before he started trying to improve the
model.
A machine learning engineer said he initially discovered hallucinations in
about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions he analyzed. A third
developer said he found hallucinations in nearly every one of the 26,000
transcripts he created with Whisper.
The problems persist even in well-recorded, short audio samples. A recent study
by computer scientists uncovered 187 hallucinations in more than 13,000 clear
audio snippets they examined.
That trend would lead to tens of thousands of faulty transcriptions over
millions of recordings, researchers said."
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: October 29, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-29-114914583
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
