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Incident 732: Whisper Speech-to-Text AI Reportedly Found to Create Violent Hallucinations

Description: Researchers at Cornell reportedly found that OpenAI's Whisper, a speech-to-text system, can hallucinate violent language and fabricated details, especially with long pauses in speech, such as from those with speech impairments. Analyzing 13,000 clips, they determined 1% contained harmful hallucinations. These errors pose risks in hiring, legal trials, and medical documentation. The study suggests improving model training to reduce these hallucinations for diverse speaking patterns.

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Alleged: OpenAI developed an AI system deployed by OpenAI , Whisper , Companies using Whisper and Organizations integrating Whisper into customer service systems, which harmed Individuals with speech impairments , Users whose speech is misinterpreted by Whisper , Professionals relying on accurate transcriptions and General public.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
732
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2024-02-12
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Applied Taxonomies
MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

A further 23 subdomains create an accessible and understandable classification of hazards and harms associated with AI
 

7.3. Lack of capability or robustness

Risk Domain

The Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental harms, and (7) AI system safety, failures & limitations.
 
  1. AI system safety, failures, and limitations

Entity

Which, if any, entity is presented as the main cause of the risk
 

AI

Timing

The stage in the AI lifecycle at which the risk is presented as occurring
 

Post-deployment

Intent

Whether the risk is presented as occurring as an expected or unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
 

Unintentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Incident OccurrenceAI speech-to-text can hallucinate violent language
AI speech-to-text can hallucinate violent language

AI speech-to-text can hallucinate violent language

news.cornell.edu

AI speech-to-text can hallucinate violent language
news.cornell.edu · 2024

Speak a little too haltingly and with long pauses, and a speech-to-text transcriber might put harmful, violent words in your mouth, Cornell researchers have discovered.

 OpenAI's Whisper -- an artificial intelligence-powered speech recognit…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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