LLMMedium
AI Transcription Tool Whisper Reportedly Inserting Fabricated Content in Medical Transcripts
- Occurred
- Oct 26, 2024
- Published
- Oct 26, 2024
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
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.
Developers
- OpenAI
Deployers
- OpenAI
Harmed parties
- Patients
- Patients reliant on Whisper
- Medical practitioners reliant on Whisper
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Whisper is an LLM-based transcription tool hallucinating content in medical settings, causing potential harm but no confirmed mass casualties.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8