6
My local news bot started making up quotes from the mayor last week
I run a small town news site and we set up an AI to write up council meeting notes from the audio files. It worked fine for months, but last Tuesday, it put a direct quote in the mayor's mouth about 'funding the new bridge with casino money' that he never said. I only caught it because a council member called me, really upset. I had to pull the whole article down and redo it by hand, which took me three hours. In my experience, the tool got confused by two people talking over each other in the recording and just filled in the blanks with something that sounded right. Has anyone else run into their summary AI just inventing facts when the source material gets messy? I'm looking for a fix or maybe a different tool that's better with messy audio.
3 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In3 Comments
jamie_carter877d ago
Wait, the mayor never said that? That's actually kind of scary. I mean, it just made up a whole quote about casino money for a bridge. What if you hadn't caught it and people got mad at him for something he didn't even say? That's a huge deal for a small town. Messy audio is one thing, but the bot just writing its own story is a whole different problem.
4
taylorellis7d ago
That point about the tool filling in blanks when people talk over each other is the core problem. You might need to look at a system that flags low-confidence sections for human review, instead of trying to always produce a finished draft. Some tools can mark parts of the transcript where the audio was unclear, so you know exactly where to check the work.
-1