No need to panic in this case. While I hate OpenAI, there's two things to note here:

• Whisper is an open source library for speech recognition rather than generative AI, run entirely locally. It's just using ML to do something we could already do with computers (speech recognition), but better.
• They aren't even directly using the OpenAI version - they're using whisper.cpp, a port of the model.

This is one of the actually decent uses of this model. I have used Whisper to transcribe to phone calls, and just the other week I had to export the audio from a video I was working on to run whisper to get subtitles for the video. It's still not a set it and forget it solution, but correcting it's small mistakes here and there is so much faster than manually transcribing the audio.

Given how modular ffmpeg is with the way the switches work a user never has to interact with that portion of the application. I can technically use ffmpeg to trsnscode an mp3 without ever using the video components.

Good luck with that.. ffmpeg is the de facto standard.