My buddy said I could train an AI to sort my junk mail and it went sideways fast

So my friend Dave, who works in tech support, told me I could use some free AI tool to sort through the 50 spammy credit card offers I get every week. I spent like 4 hours setting up this script that was supposed to learn what was junk and what was bills. It ended up tossing my electric bill into the trash folder and keeping a pizza coupon because I ordered from them twice last month. Has anyone else tried automating something simple only to have the AI make things worse?

2 comments

2 Comments

ninah104d ago

yeah but @mila_reed i gotta push back a little on the "solving a problem that barely existed" part. like the spam problem DID exist, it was just that the old solution was me deleting stuff manually which was annoying but it worked. the AI version just swapped one hassle for a different bigger hassle. i think the real issue is people like dave telling us these tools are "set and forget" when they really need constant babysitting. that electric bill thing sounds exactly like what happened to me - the AI learned the wrong pattern because it only saw two data points. it didnt get that pizza coupons are one time things and bills are recurring.

mila_reed4d ago

oh man i feel this so hard. i tried training an ai to auto-reply to my DMs on my small business page and it ended up sending a "thanks for your interest" message to my landlord complaining about a broken toilet. another time i set up a filter to organize my email by sender but it kept flagging my mom's chain emails as urgent and shoving actual work messages into spam. honestly these tools act like they know what we want but they just dont get the nuance of real life. classic case of technology solving a problem that barely existed in the first place.