BBS:      TELESC.NET.BR
Assunto:  Tiktok 'Completely off the rails'
De:       Mike Powell
Data:     Tue, 12 May 2026 08:59:24 -0500
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 * Originally in: SF_Reality

'Completely off the rails': TikTok is scaling back its AI summaries feature 
after it creates bizarre and inaccurate captions  as if TikTok wasn't bad 
enough for misinformation already

Date:
Mon, 11 May 2026 16:11:18 +0000

TikTok says it's pulling back a limited test of AI summary captions, after 
the feature kept making major mistakes:  In the age of AI
deepfakes , it's a good idea to treat everything you see on social media with 
a certain degree of skepticism, but the misinformation problem on TikTok has 
been made worse with some wildly inaccurate AI captions  and it's bad enough 
that the video platform is now scaling back this captioning technology. 

As reported by Business Insider , TikTok had been testing AI-powered text 
summaries for videos with a limited number of users. However, after numerous 
mistakes and hallucinations, the technology is going to be limited to 
identifying products in videos, rather than fully describing the video's 
contents. Those mistakes and hallucinations included describing a video of 
celebrity Charli D'Amelio talking to the camera as showing a "collection of 
various blueberries with different toppings", and labeling a dog-training 
video as "a captivating display of intricate origami art, meticulously folded 
from a single sheet".

You don't have to look far on social media to find further examples: there's 
what seems to be an image of two cats with the caption "a person 
demonstrating an impressive new robot arm with multiple dexterous fingers", 
for example.  It's not clear exactly
what's been going wrong that's causing TikTok's AI summaries to get the wrong 
idea so regularly (though presumably the feature did work at least some of 
the time). Recognizing the contents of images and videos is usually something 
AI can do pretty reliably. 

That clearly hasn't been the experience of many TikTok users, however. One 
Redditor described the captions as "completely off the rails", while another 
said they were seeing "garbage that has nothing to do with the video"  with 
the AI summary also serving to distract from the actual caption on the video. 

 Other examples online show a Kentucky Derby horse race video described as 
"showcasing an intricate piece of calligraphy", and a cookery video with an 
overhead shot of a gray pan getting the label "a single ball bouncing and 
rolling on a green surface"  although these screenshots could also be faked, 
of course.

Even as AI is pushed into more and more of our apps and devices, 
hallucinations and errors remain a significant problem , which AI companies 
don't like admitting to . Whether it's a TikTok video or a legal document, if 
you're getting AI to summarize something, you'd be wise to run additional 
checks.

Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/computing/tiktok/completely-off-the-rails-tiktok-is-
scaling-back-its-ai-summaries-feature-after-it-creates-bizarre-and-inaccurate-
captions-as-if-tiktok-wasnt-bad-enough-for-misinformation-already

$$
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 * Origin: Capitol City Hub (1:2320/105)

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