My dad told me to stop cleaning my AI training data by hand, he was right

I spent 6 months manually tagging images for a small computer vision project I was working on in my basement. My dad, who does data entry for a logistics company, came over and said I was wasting my time. He told me to just use a quick script to filter out the bad samples and move on. I argued with him for like 20 minutes about accuracy and quality control. Finally gave it a try after my third all-nighter fixing duplicates. The script caught 300 mislabeled photos in under a minute, stuff I had completely missed. Has anyone else got advice from a non-tech family member that actually worked better than your own method?

2 comments

2 Comments

pat_roberts5519d ago

Wow, sometimes the simplest solutions are the ones we overlook the most.

phoenix_martin4019d ago

My Uncle Jerry spent 40 years as a mechanic and he always said the same thing - people bring in cars with all these fancy computer codes and he'd find a loose wire or a dirty spark plug. Nine times out of ten it was something stupid simple that anyone could have fixed at home. I see the same thing happen in my own life, like when I was trying to build a shelf unit and spent two hours overcomplicating the measurements before my wife just held the pieces together and said "why don't you just use a level?" We are conditioned to think we need complex answers but usually the truth is right in front of our faces. It is HARD to slow down enough to see the obvious stuff because our brains want to solve problems like puzzles instead of just looking at what's actually wrong. That's why I appreciate posts like this, it keeps me honest about not overthinking everything.