HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

AI Transcription Tool Whisper Reportedly Inserting Fabricated Content in Medical Transcripts

October 26, 2024

OpenAI's AI-powered transcription tool Whisper, used to translate and transcribe audio content such as patient consultations with doctors, is advertised as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.” However, software engineers, developers and academic researchers have alleged that it is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences and that some of the hallucinations can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric, and even imagined medical treatments.
Alleged deployer
openai
Alleged developer
openai
Alleged harmed parties
patients, patients-reliant-on-whisper, medical-practitioners-reliant-on-whisper

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/827

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.