Sounds reasonable, but a lot of recent advances come from being able to let the machine train against itself, or a twin / opponent without human involvement.

As an example of just running the thing itself, consider a neural network given the objective of re-creating its input with a narrow layer in the middle. This forces a narrower description (eg age/sex/race/facing left or right/whatever) of the feature space.

Another is GAN, where you run fake vs spot-the-fake until it gets good.