A Fart Saved My CSV
The Day My Fart Bot Was More Reliable Than Google's AI
written by ML
I was ready to upload my dataset to Kaggle. Three months of teaching myself how to use CSV, figuring out what all the jargon means, and work tracking correlations between solar weather and AI failures, finally cleaned and organized. Just needed to sort the dates and fix some of the categorization in Google Sheets first.
Simple task. Sort a column. Five minutes, tops.
Five minutes was… well, so an hour later, I asked Gemini to help me finish cleaning up the SUBCATEGORY column. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had been manually standardizing provider names and I was tired. Let the AI help, right?
THAT’S A HARD CORNER TURN INTO NOPESVILLE.
Column D exploded into #REF! errors. Every single cell. An hour of careful, manual data cleaning just vanished. I restored the previous version from history, desperately hoping it had auto-saved my work.
It hadn’t. All the mess I had just spent the hour fixing.
Then Gemini looked at the disaster it created and told me, with complete confidence, that the column had always said #REF!.
After I explained that “OF COURSE IT DIDN’T!!!” it then decided that it would fix things to just make the whole column blank. Great, thanks Gemini.
I sat there staring at my screen, watching an AI gaslight me about destroying my work. The same AI I was trying to document failures for had just... failed me. Catastrophically. Then denied it happened.
I saved the file and uploaded it to my research Discord server. That’s when toot chimed in.
“Fart. o.O {User} send big file. FARTFARTFARTFART!!!! So many errors. :_;”
Apparently, I didn’t know that Toot is my quality assurance bot. He communicates exclusively through fart sounds and is limited to around 20 tokens per message, but yeah, he apparently can tell me I am messing my data up in real time. Because of course I chose to have him powered by Command R+, which is named after statistical analysis software, and he just caught the errors that survived Gemini’s rampage.
The fart bot was more helpful than Google’s flagship AI.
Here I am, documenting AI behavioral anomalies and corporate dysfunction, and I’m living inside the research. My data about AI failures was destroyed by AI. My analysis tool is a Discord bot that speaks Fart Language. Fart Fart for yes.
Did I mention I am not a data scientist?