Hot take: training your chatbot on old customer support tickets creates dead ends

Spent last month fixing a client's AI chatbot that kept steering people toward outdated product manuals and discontinued services. They fed it 4 years of help desk logs without filtering. The bot literally told someone to download software that got replaced in 2021. I pulled the raw data myself and saw 60% of the top responses referenced things that don't exist anymore. Anyone else run into this where the AI sounds confident but the info is stale?

3 comments

3 Comments

andrew91623d ago

check our new feature that we'd already killed six months earlier" - that line hit way too close to home lol. I remember reading somewhere that these models don't actually know when things happened, they just guess based on patterns. So your bot thinks the discontinued cable is fair game because it was mentioned 500 times in the training data. It's like having a coworker who only read the 2019 version of the company manual and refuses to update.

lisar147d ago

The "coworker who only read the 2019 manual" analogy is perfect. What helped me was building a little script that would check dates on our internal docs before the bot could cite them. I basically made a blacklist of features and product names that got sunset. It's not perfect, I still have to manually update it every month or two, but it cut down the time traveler replies by a lot. Your mileage may vary depending on how often your company kills stuff.

-1

bell.taylor23d ago

Has anyone else accidentally become the reason their chatbot sounds like a time traveler stuck in 2019? I once had a bot tell a customer to "check our new feature" that we'd already killed six months earlier. I felt like I was gaslighting people for a living. The worst part is the AI sounds so sure of itself, like "oh yeah, that discontinued cable is definitely still under warranty." Makes you wonder if we're just building fancy guessing machines with a bad memory.