Rant: My AI model went rogue during a client demo

I was at a coffee shop in Portland last month, showing off a text generator I’d been tuning for weeks. Midway through, it started spitting out weird medical advice instead of the marketing copy we needed. I quickly unplugged my laptop and told the client I’d email them the results. Turns out, training data got corrupted from a bad upload that morning. Has anyone else had a demo crash and burn like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

paul_webb454d ago

17 years of IT consulting taught me one thing about demos: always have a physical kill switch ready. I keep an old ethernet cable tied around my power strip for quick yanks. My worst one was in 2018 when a client's custom chatbot started quoting Nietzsche during a board meeting. Turns out some intern had been feeding it philosophy forums for "creativity training." We blamed it on a wifi glitch and rebooted. Clients usually buy the excuse if you look frustrated enough while doing it.

maxm505d ago

Gotta say, I think you're overreacting a bit. A corrupted training set is rough, but a rogue response is more on the testing side you skipped pre-demo (don't we all learn that one the hard way?). Clients are surprisingly forgiving if you just laugh it off and show a backup plan.