The training process is not purely mechanical. The amount of time that goes into selecting, cleaning, reformatting and otherwise preparing the training data is

The training process is not purely mechanical. The amount of time that goes into selecting, cleaning, reformatting and otherwise preparing the training data is significant not to mention all of the other work involved in the actual training. If your measure is simply the amount of work done by humans then we should simply reclassify ML models as art pieces and dismiss all of the criticism as gatekeeping by people who don't understand hypermodern art.