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← Glossary

Definition

Human in the loop

Also: HITL, human-in-the-loop

Human in the loop is a design where an AI system does the work but a person reviews, approves, or handles the cases the system is unsure about, keeping judgement and accountability with a human.

The opposite of fully autonomous. A human-in-the-loop system drafts, flags, or proposes, and a person makes the final call on anything high-stakes or low-confidence.

It is usually the right starting point: you get most of the speed-up immediately, build trust in the system’s judgement, and widen its autonomy only where the track record earns it. Most of our launches begin here.

Related terms

  • AI agent: An AI agent is a system that uses a language model to decide which steps to take and which tools to call to finish a goal, instead of just answering a single prompt.
  • Workflow automation: Workflow automation is the practice of moving a repeatable business process from manual steps to a system that runs it end to end, with a person involved only where judgement is actually needed.
  • Hallucination: A hallucination is when a model states something false or invented as if it were fact, because it predicts plausible-sounding text rather than looking anything up.