How Safe Is AI Transcription: What You Need To Know

by Tat Banerjee| Mar 22, 2020

Translate Your English Video Into Filipino And Chinese

You are a content creator who uses AI.

But how safe is the AI you use, whether for transcription, translation or dubbing. Also some tips on how to use AI better in your journey into expanding your market.

There was a great article on this recently at How-To-Geek.

Ok - so why do you use AI? As a content creator you care about engagement. AI Transcription combined with Open Captions is fantastic for engagement.

Practically what does this mean and how can you protect yourself better?

AI Transcription Models

There are three basic models for AI transcription.

Automated - Google, IBM, MS, Amazon; basically all the tech majors plus a number of smalled startups like Otter
Manual - Rev, Upwork, Fivver etc
Hybrid - These use a combination of both AI and Human. video translator falls into this category.

In all of these, the idea is you use an AI translator app or an AI voice transcriber and translator app to add (a) open captions to your video for engagement, or (b) translate your video to reach a wider audience.

The Challenge

How Safe Is AI Transcription: AI, human or hybrid - which model is best?

Essentially Automated is not that good, and Human carries privacy and security risks.

This story by GigaOm and this story by cyber security journalist Brian Krebs highlight the risks involved.

In the first story freelance workers in Pakistan did not get paid and so started messing with the transcripts, and in the second a number of medical records were leaked. Note: this was sourced from Matt Hughes story in How-To-Geek, you should read it.

So what can you do?

The VideoTranslator Model

We think that hybrid is best, and ideally you should do it yourself. Why?

The simple answer is this - as we move up information complexity AI transcription gets worse.

More valuable information, such as your value proposition is by definition scarce on the Internet. Hence the best person to get it right is the subject matter expert, i.e. you.

We recommend you use your own people to do high value tasks.

Use AI as a tool to enhance productivity, and not as a cost saving only!