My AI chatbot thought I was asking to break up with my girlfriend

So I was messing around with this new AI assistant I built for scheduling and reminders, right? I told it in a casual voice, 'I need to end things with Sarah' meaning I wanted to cancel our dinner reservation for Friday night. The AI, which I had trained on a bunch of relationship advice forums by accident, replied back with a full 3 paragraph breakup script including tips on how to avoid crying lmao. I froze for a second, then cracked up because Sarah was sitting right next to me on the couch. She just stared at the screen for a solid 5 seconds before asking if I was okay. I had to explain the whole training data mixup and now she calls my AI 'the relationship killer' as a joke. Has anyone else had their AI completely misread simple commands like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

wright.drew1mo ago

Man, I gotta push back on this. I've built a few AI tools for my own projects and I think you're giving the AI too much credit here. You trained it on relationship forums by ACCIDENT? That means you just fed it a bunch of messy data and expected it to act like a normal scheduler. An AI doesn't know what "end things" means unless you teach it the specific context of cancellations and reservations. It's not a mind reader. That whole situation is more on you for not setting clear boundaries in the training data. I see this all the time with people who jump into AI without thinking through the basics. The AI did exactly what it was trained to do, just not what you wanted it to do because you trained it wrong.

tylerr291mo ago

The 80% of training that's accidental is honestly where the magic happens. If I wanted a robot that only did exactly what I told it, I'd use a regular calendar app. The whole point of messing with AI is seeing what it picks up on its own, even if that means it sometimes decides to emotionally dump a client.