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The 5 Ways AI Fails and How to Fix Each One - AI Foundations Day 9

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The Five Failure Modes

5:24 with Laura Coronel

Generic responses, hallucinations, off-topic drift, tone mismatch, and repeated mistakes: what causes each one and the specific fix for it, usually in a single message. Plus the signal that tells you it's time to abandon the thread and start fresh.

This is part of the AI Bootcamp. Click here to learn more.

Vocabulary

  • Constraint — A limit you set in a prompt — length, tone, audience, what to avoid, what a good answer must include. Too few constraints is the usual reason AI output comes back generic.
  • Hallucination — When AI states something made up as if it were fact — an invented statistic, a study that doesn't exist. It generates what sounds likely, not what's verified.
  • Reasoning model — A model that works through a problem internally before answering (o3, o4-mini, Gemini Pro, Claude with extended thinking). Don't tell these how to think — just say clearly what you want.

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    Welcome to Day 9 of the program. Today, we're focusing on how AI fails, why 0:00
    it happens, 0:03
    and how to fix it fast. Because AI will fail you, not 0:03
    occasionally, regularly. The 0:08
    goal isn't to avoid failure. The real skill is recognizing what went 0:10
    wrong and 0:14
    knowing how to fix it. At this point, you've been using AI for 0:15
    over a week. You've 0:19
    prompted, researched, built, and started shaping your spec. 0:21
    And somewhere along the way, 0:25
    AI probably gave you something generic, 0:26
    something incorrect, 0:29

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