I guess I agree with the article in that simply using an existing neural network, treating it like a blackbox (which to me it is), and feeding it cropped photos

I guess I agree with the article in that simply using an existing neural network, treating it like a blackbox (which to me it is), and feeding it cropped photos pulled from an API is not rocket science. Also I see a lot of 'data scientists' portfolios where they basically just took existing ML projects and tweaked them slightly, wrote a few lines of python, and tried to make themselves seem like cutting edge devs. But yeah I respect that there are true geniuses behind the development of these techniques themselves, and even just training a blackbox NN can be tough.