Study finds hallucinations in hospital-used AI tool

About 1% of audio transcriptions written by Open AI’s Whisper, a speech recognition tool launched in 2022 and currently used in hospitals, contain hallucinated phrases or sentences when nobody spoke, according to a recent study. 

Advertisement

Researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., University of Washington in Seattle, New York University in New York City and University of Virginia in Charlottesville investigated how aphasia, which often appears after strokes, could affect Whisper-made transcriptions. 

More than 85 health organizations and 45,000 clinicians are using a Whisper-based tool built by Nabla.

The researchers fed Whisper about 40 hours of data, including 23 hours of speech from people with aphasia. Of the 1% of hallucinated text, 38% of it featured a perpetuation of violence, inaccurate associations or false authority. 

The findings were presented in the Association for Computing Machinery’s “FAccT ’24: The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency,” held in Rio de Janeiro June 3-6.

Becker’s 3rd Annual Fall Chief Pharmacy Officer Summit is the top tier event that the people leading the future of pharmacy convene. This 3-day event is built specifically for Chief Pharmacy Officers and senior pharmacy leaders. The sessions examine the workforce, financial and clinical priorities shaping pharmacy today. Becker’s is where candid discussions flourish and new ideas thrive. Becker's 3rd Annual Fall Chief Pharmacy Officer Summit

Advertisement

Next Up in Patient Safety & Outcomes

Advertisement

Comments are closed.