OpenAI’s Transcription Tool Hallucinates. Hospitals Are Using It Anyway.

Within the medical-scientific sector, it is of paramount importance to pay attention to the information that is communicated, especially from the point of view of veracity and accuracy. What is communicated within hospitals, clinics and similar environments has the potential to change patients' lives - it is therefore normal to expect a certain level of meticulousness from experts in the field.

In September 2022, OpenAI, one of the leading AI companies, released a tool called ‘Whisper’, the purpose of which is speech recognition and its subsequent transcription. Upon release, the company stated that Whisper approached ‘human-level robustness’ in the accuracy of audio transcription.

However, the current situation seems quite different. According to several experts, the performance of the tool is rather disappointing, the research carried out has yielded quite unsatisfactory results - nevertheless, this lack of accuracy on the part of Whisper does not seem to be a persuasive enough deterrent to convince hospitals to terminate its use.