That moment I realized most people don't know how to train their own custom AI models

I spent 3 hours last week helping a guy in a startup forum who kept feeding his chatbot raw PDFs of legal documents without any tagging or structure, and he couldn't figure out why it kept spitting out jumbled answers, has anyone else seen people skip the prep work and blame the model?

2 comments

2 Comments

zara_allen9d ago

Happened to me with a buddy who was trying to train a bot on his entire email inbox. Just raw copy and pasted everything, no filtering. Took forever to convince him to clean up the data first.

burns.brooke8d ago

My friend tried to build a model that would auto-generate social media posts from his old blog content. He just dumped 500 blog posts in there with all the HTML markup and broken images. The model kept trying to write posts that included "alt text missing" and random CSS class names. Took him two days to realize he should have stripped all that junk out first.