Remember when you had to hand label a thousand images for a simple model?

Back in 2018, I spent a whole week labeling street sign photos for a college project. Did about 50 an hour, my eyes were crossing. Then last month, I used an auto-labeling tool on a similar dataset. Finished the same work in under two hours. The accuracy was maybe 95% right out of the gate. It's wild how that grind just vanished. Anyone else have a 'before and after' moment with a specific AI tool?

3 comments

3 Comments

finley_flores282mo ago

That auto-labeling speed sounds nice, but that 5% error rate is a real problem. You still have to check every single label, and hunting for those wrong ones can take longer than just doing it yourself from scratch sometimes. Last project I did, the AI kept mixing up similar looking parts, and fixing its mistakes added hours. The grind didn't vanish, it just changed into a different kind of tedious work.

davis.casey19d ago

Wait, am I the only one that's had the AI straight up invent stuff that wasn't even there? I had a batch where it kept putting labels on random background noise because the lighting was slightly off. Ended up spending a whole afternoon just deleting false positives. It honestly felt like I was doing a second pass of the whole dataset anyway, so what's the point of the "help" if I still have to look at every single frame. The grind just shifts from drawing boxes to hunting for mistakes, same time wasted just different boring work.

danielh812mo ago

Yeah I used to think auto-labeling was the answer to everything... but then I had a project where it kept marking every round object as a stop sign. Spent more time fixing those than if I'd just started from zero. It really depends on the data.