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Fine-Tuning My Chatbot: From Helpful to Hallucinating Mess

Ever wonder why your AI tweaks backfire? One dev's fine-tuning fiasco turned a solid RAG chatbot into a babbling idiot—and it's a warning for us all.

Aisha Patel 📅 Apr 01, 2026 ⏱️ 3 min read 👁️ 4 views

⚡ Key Takeaways

Fine-tuning spiked hallucinations and broke RAG in a real chatbot project.
For small personal bots, prompts + RAG outperform fine-tuning—no extra cost or complexity.
It's often a revenue play for AI providers; test rigorously beyond shiny metrics.

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Written by

Former ML engineer turned writer. Covers computer vision and robotics with a practitioner perspective.

#RAG #chatbots #fine-tuning #hallucinations

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Originally reported by Towards AI