S.O.N.A.I.S. Comic Archive

Setting: again lunch area; Max & Adil at same table.
Max: I've heard you got yourself into trouble.
Adil: Yeah, that'll teach me to get inspired by your nerdy stories! Can't you talk about more up-to-date things than ancient games I haven't even played?

Max: Well, have you seen the demo of this new A.I. image generator?
Adil: Yes, it looks impressive. The output looks like professional photographs.
Max: Indeed, and I think it is suspiciously good.
Adil: What do you mean?

Max: I suspect during their demo, they simply queried descriptions that are in the training set. Of course the system will then simply return the perfect-looking training images nearly unaltered.
Adil: Oh…

Heidi joins the lunch area.
Adil: I'll get my reputation back on track, wait until you see how many licenses for our A.I. toolkit will soon be sold when people see our demo!

Adil has left for his desk.
Max: Quite ambitious, isn't he? The demo I've set up is good, but still exhibits some inherent limitations of the model.
Heidi: Well, you just hinted at how those could be hidden, but luckily he does not have the means.

Adil behind his desk.
Adil: Now it is time for that Python course to prove its usefulness! I'll show them. From the documentation, it does not seem that hard to retrain the model. Now, how do I extract frames from a video file…

Setting: developer area with Max & Heidi.
Caption: A while later…
Alana: People are really impressed by the demo of our A.I. toolkit. They say it seems nearly flawless. Sales are great. Well done, team.
Max: Flawless? That's stretching it quite a bit. Hey, wait a minute…

Max: This is not the model tensor I created. It is newer than what I committed to the repository!
Heidi: That training loss curve looks weird. I have seen this before…

Max: It scores nearly 100% on the test video, this model is rigged! It has been trained on the demo video.
Heidi: Now that I think of it, wasn't Adil following a Python course?
Alana: I feel tempted to find a sock and a bar of soap…

Setting: Heidi, Alana, and Max are mobbing Adil in his office.
Heidi: Adil, you have trained an A.I. classifier on demo material. That is highly unethical.
Adil: Unetiwhaaa?
Max: I think many working in marketing have trouble pronouncing that word…

Alana: We had to send an embarrassing apology message to all clients who bought the kit. Luckily they believed it was an accident.
Max: I know we're still a small start-up, but we need stricter processes to avoid mishaps like the ones from past few days.

Alana: Indeed, and we're at a point where an extra colleague becomes desirable. Not just a developer, they should also have a knack for Quality Assurance.
Adil: Does that mean no more cowboy business?
Max: Not necessarily. It just has to be quality cowboy business.