this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
83 points (97.7% liked)
Fuck AI
5751 readers
1776 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The astounding thing about this is that transcription should be deterministic. There's no room for creativity here. Transcription is not a job that requires imagination. The closest you get to that is filling in stammers and stuff, but even that should be deterministic.
Despite mechanisms of linguistic change to avoid it, there are some instances of morphological ambiguity in natural language, meaning transcription is not always purely deterministic. It tends towards determinism the more narrow you make the transcription (e.g. for English, annotating stress patterns will avoid some ambiguity in places; transcribing to something like narrow IPA will avoid more), and context (=the semantic one) tends to handle the rest.
That aside, trained humans can perform the task exceedingly well despite these pitfalls. The problem with the machine is it introduces its own extralinguistic issues at every level of analysis: just the necessary interaction of a phonetic model with an LLM adds a lot of slop (pun intended).