Serious question about AI model training data hygiene

I was dead set against data cleaning. Thought it was a waste of time. Then I fed my model 50,000 customer chat logs from a call center in Omaha. Half were gibberish. Transcriptions full of background noise and dropped words. The AI started making up responses about car warranties. Spent 3 days scrubbing it. Now I run everything through a basic filter first. Has anyone else had a bad training set completely derail a project?

3 comments

3 Comments

michael69317d ago

Wait, did you say your AI started pitching car warranties? That's honestly kind of hilarious in a terrifying way. At least it wasn't selling extended warranties on toasters or something equally random. I had a project where I fed a model a bunch of forum posts and it started ending every response with "lol" and "u mad bro". Two days of scrubbing that garbage and I still find traces of teenage slang in the outputs. Data hygiene is one of those boring things nobody wants to do until it bites you in the butt hard.

nina_sullivan6117d ago

Gotta correct you on one thing @michael693 - it wasn't pitching car warranties, it was trying to sell me on some weird pet insurance plan that covered "emotional support hamsters". Loaded a dataset from random forums and it picked up on some seriously broken logic from a thread about exotic pet claims. Ended up with a model that thought every user was a potential customer for reptile liability coverage. Probably spent more time scrubbing that mess than I did building the damned thing in the first place. Data hygiene ain't glamorous but you learn the hard way when your bot starts trying to upsell someone on a bearded dragon health plan.

park.iris17d ago

Heard a similar story from another dev @michael693 where their model started speaking in pirate slang.