That data guy told me to feed my model junk data and it tanked my accuracy

My coworker Dave said to just dump all our customer chat logs into the AI training set without cleaning them up. I figured he knew his stuff since he's been at the company for 5 years. After 3 weeks of training, our chatbot started calling people the wrong names and giving bad product advice. Has anyone else had a coworker give you training advice that backfired hard?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan_young298d ago

Is Dave the same kind of guy who thinks he can fix his own AC unit by watching one YouTube video and ends up flooding his whole basement? lol. @gavinb97 nailed it with that example about the old support tickets and the nonexistent products, reminds me of when my uncle tried to teach his GPS to take dirt roads by plugging in random coordinates and it sent him into a pond. People get so caught up in the "more data" hype they forget quality matters way more than quantity. Bet Dave heard some AI bro on a podcast say "big data is the future" and just ran with it without testing anything first.

clairen859d ago

Funny thing nobody's pointing out is that Dave probably wasn't trying to sabotage you on purpose. Had a similar situation at my old place where the senior guy kept insisting we use all the data because "more is better." Turns out he was just repeating something he heard at a conference and never actually tried it himself. People like Dave don't understand that garbage in means garbage out, especially with customer data where one wrong name can wreck the whole thing. Might be worth asking him if he's ever actually trained a model from scratch or if he's just passing along buzzwords.

gavinb979d ago

More is better" lol I had a buddy who got told the same thing by his boss and spent a month feeding his model old support tickets that had the wrong product codes in them. It started recommending people buy stuff that didn't exist anymore and they had to scrap the whole thing.