Hi John,

Based humble personal experience - every project of interest should be treated like an own child ;).

With or without AI, they all grow up, develop and/or perish due to some mis-specification.

Best regards,

 Stan

By definition, a project is an extraordinary set of related activities that is not part of the ordinary activities in an organization, limited in time, in resources and has a clear project goals. So, it is not possible to treat any artifact such as an AI as a project. 

Further, what exactly do you mean by AI, something that is to some extent autonomous? There are several developers and researchers that employ AI techniques, but not necessarily as part of autonomous systems but rather reactive systems where the techniques add additional support that we humans can consider to be intelligent. 

If it is an autonomous AI we are addressing, then I would treat it as an artifact and perform experiments. As such, I would probably run development and experiments in the form of projects for pragmatic reasons of funding etc. Further, I would care about a lot of things such as the ideas, methods, results, project members etc. There is one significant difference, in my perspective, you love your children irrespective of what they do. You may not like their actions, but you are still their parent. Concerning an artifact, it is but a tool and however much I like it, loving it is out of the question.