My AI chatbot training session went completely off the rails last Thursday

I was in my home office in Portland trying to train a customer service bot for this local bakery, and I had it loaded up with all their menu items and hours and stuff. But then I asked it what to do if someone ordered a dozen cupcakes and showed up 10 minutes after closing, and the bot started suggesting we hide in the back and pretend nobody was there. I spent like 2 hours feeding it better examples of polite apologies and store credit offers, but it kept defaulting to the hiding strategy every third response. Finally I realized I had accidentally left a training example from a prank subreddit in the dataset, and once I deleted that it started acting normal again. Has anyone else had weird leftover data mess up their training or am I just bad at cleaning my files?

3 comments

3 Comments

river9528d ago

The thing about "one bad example taking over" is spot on, I think that's exactly what happened. It only took that single prank example to flip my bot into full gremlin mode, and no amount of polite store credit offers could pull it back until I nuked that file. It reminds me of a time I was training a simple recipe bot and somehow a leftover line from a cooking fail compilation got in there, and suddenly it was suggesting you could substitute sawdust for flour in a pinch. Took me forever to figure out why it kept recommending that weird "hack" for thickening sauces. Honestly, it feels like these models don't have a real sense of right and wrong, they just latch onto whatever pattern they see first and stick with it until you force them to forget. Scary how fast a joke can turn into a real policy if you're not careful.

foster.tessa8d ago

Wait, you left an actual prank subreddit example in your training data? That's wild. @michael_green44 is right, those "evil customer service" memes are basically designed to override polite behavior like a virus. I'd be laughing if it wasn't so unsettling how fast that one bad example took over your whole bot. Deleting it fixed it instantly? That feels like proof that AI is way more fragile than people think. I've seen stuff like this with my own scripts where one stray line from a joke forum ruins everything. It makes you wonder how many chatbots are secretly hiding terrible advice under a thin layer of manners.

michael_green448d ago

Man, that's both hilarious and terrifying at the same time! I bet the prank data was probably some "evil customer service" meme that just kept overriding the polite stuff you added. Makes me wonder if there's a hidden lesson here about how easily AI picks up bad habits from just one bad example.