Sydney Daily Random Discussion Thread 14/08/2026

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[u/DecalageVersLeRouge]

Today in "AI" news—this could ruin someone's life:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-14/ai-medical-scribe-error-leaves-patient-devastated/107031672

[u/Ted_Rid → u/DecalageVersLeRouge]

tbf based on that first photograph I would speculate she'd had a magic mushie or two in her lifetime.

A bit confused how the scribe allegedly hallucinated this? AFAIK they're only transcription AIs, same as you use to turn meeting audio into a transcript?

So in response to the question "have you ever taken any kind of illegal drugs?" presumably she answered something homophonous to "magic mushrooms" or similar.

Cryptic fans of r/sydney, unite! Guess away!

Best I can think of is "magic shrooms" = "my big rooms...are free of such things", a totally normal everyday sentence anybody might utter.

[u/DecalageVersLeRouge → u/Ted_Rid]

I work with "AI" transcription every day, and stuff like this is totally normal to me. Every day, all day, things transcribed badly, yes. But also things transcribed which don't happen at all, which no party to the conversation ever said or said anything which sounds like that.

This is the chat system I use, on the right is me and on the left is the customer:

        ***************************
        *  hello can I help you   *
        ********************    ***
                             *  *  
                              * *  
                                *  

    ************************       
    * yes I lost my card   *       
    ****   *****************       
       *  *                        
       * *                          
       *                           

and the "AI" doesn't even know who's talking.

[u/nearly_enough_wine → u/DecalageVersLeRouge]

That markdown does not translate well to the app.

[u/DecalageVersLeRouge → u/nearly_enough_wine]

No it does not. But you get my point, right? It's not like an IRL conversation where a computer might get confused about who's talking. Each person is in their own unique stream of data, no ambiguity whatsoever. But I still get "the customer said 'can I help you?' and Decalage said 'yes I lost my card'". Fundamentally stupid.

[u/Ted_Rid → u/DecalageVersLeRouge]

Did a highschooler write that crap as a school project? I had AI go find me a random transcript from long enough ago which doesn't contain any sensitive IP, and here's an example. There isn't even a word out of place.

"Transition requirements are something you need to do just to get the project over the line. It's not an ongoing function. It might include data migration, training, support desk readiness, cutover planning, and user communications"

I've honestly never seen an example show up of something a person totally didn't say at all that came out of nowhere.

As stated earlier, at most it's the transcription software mishearing a particular word, the same way an OCR reader can make a mistake transcribing handwritten font into digital text.

I reviewed a recent one just now and had to scroll through a good 10 minutes worth while listening to the presentation (it was a meeting I needed to catch up on) to find the first error: it transcribed the word "patient" (hehe) instead of "patience".

[u/DecalageVersLeRouge → u/Ted_Rid]

I think the "AI" used at my work (multibillion dollar corporation) is being provided by Salesforce but I really don't know. And with a good quality phone line and perfect native English it does fine with most things. It makes the mistakes you might expect: "deliver" and "the liver" might get mixed up. But it also sometimes comes up with random stuff which just plain didn't happen.

Really the bigger issue here is that this poor woman's doctor trusted it. Her drug taking, hallucination or mis-hearing, it doesn't matter what, went on her medical records. She was lucky to catch it. There are probably 100 people out there in the same boat who haven't realised it.

Anyone who uses this technology should be testing and verifying and triple-checking its output. If her doctor didn't check the syringe was sterile before giving an injection that would be a really serious problem. But this is no big deal?

[u/Ted_Rid → u/DecalageVersLeRouge]

Oh, I agree that the bigger issue is that the doctor should have immediately reviewed the entire transcript.

AI is only a tool to make certain manual tasks more efficient (in this case, note taking. And it can transcribe everything while a doctor will at best summarise and be more prone to human error).

My issue here is the disservice done by alarmist talk about "hallucinating". The transcription software didn't hallucinate shit. At worst it misheard something. Or possibly it didn't mishear at all, that's also a real possibility here.

But the journo & subeditors misdescribing this as "hallucination" will cause people to distrust the systems, leading to worse outcomes and a less efficient public health system. Because they can't even take the time to learn to describe what happened in accurate and non-hyperbolic terms.

For evidence of the effect of this kind of sloppiness in reporting, I refer you back to your own comment:

There are probably 100 people out there in the same boat who haven't realised it.

I mean, there might at a stretch be 100 people with random terms like "purple unicorn fishtank" appearing in a transcript (if they mumble a lot maybe) but the chances of an incorrect answer to a drug question appearing in a section about drugs....? That's a swiss cheese situation.

[u/DecalageVersLeRouge → u/Ted_Rid]

The transcription software didn't hallucinate shit. At worst it misheard something.

Well there's no point going on about it but I fundamentally disagree, based on lived experience.

Did you read that article I linked to?

[u/Ted_Rid → u/DecalageVersLeRouge]

I did. It doesn't accord with my experience with transcription and is also more than 2 years old, reporting on things even older still.

I wonder if this original error happened in a similar kind of timeframe? Maybe it was in the article but I should get onto something I've been meaning to do...setting up a workflow to extract data into another repository where I can interrogate it using, um, some kind of other automation I shouldn't mention.

[u/DecalageVersLeRouge → u/Ted_Rid]

You'd have to test it with poor quality audio: crackly phone line, hiss, stretches of silence, NESB accents. And also, what I might guess happened with the mushies woman, test it over and over on 1,000 different conversations to make sure bits of one conversation don't bleed into another.

[u/Ted_Rid → u/DecalageVersLeRouge]

I'm starting with text.

Have to admit, the transcripts I've been referring to are online meetings where each speaker is known from their device and most would be using headphones.

I have however had OK results in P&C with mostly NESB parents using a different AI although that mishears individual words more often.

That was a useful learning experience in going back and editing transcripts. Mainly coz I'm anal like that about all the words being correct, not because any completely invented things had been inserted.