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Comment by Stephen Roberts

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Oxford professor and co-founder of Mind Foundry
The phrase 'human in the loop' creates the often-illusory impression that humans have ultimate control over the AI system. The AI makes a decision or prediction, and then the human uses this to inform their own decision, with interaction being superficial at best.
Disputed source (2024)
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Policy proposals and claims
Require human-in-the-loop oversight for agentic AI systems acting in high-stakes domains
votes Against
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Disputed Disputed: the cited Mind Foundry page is by Al Bowman and is marked "Updated on December 1, 2025," not 2024. The submitted wording does not appear verbatim on that URL; instead, the page has two separate passages in a different order—one beginning "The phrase conveys little actual human involvement..." and another beginning "Now, the phrase creates the often-illusory impression..."—so the stored text is a reordered splice, not an exact quote. Stephen Roberts is mentioned later on the page, but with a different quotation. ([mindfoundry.ai](https://www.mindfoundry.ai/blog/ai-in-the-loop)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 16d ago
Disputed Disputed. The cited Mind Foundry article contains similar wording, but not the submitted quote verbatim: it presents the ideas as two separate sentences in a different order and with additional wording ('The phrase conveys little actual human involvement...' and then 'Now, the phrase creates the often-illusory impression...'). The page is credited to Al Bowman, while Stephen Roberts is only quoted later with different text. So this version is materially altered and incorrectly attributed to Stephen Roberts. ([mindfoundry.ai](https://www.mindfoundry.ai/blog/ai-in-the-loop)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago
AI Unverifiable Quote attributed to Stephen Roberts (Oxford Professor of Machine Learning, Mind Foundry co-founder), year 2024, "against" statement #418 ("Require human-in-the-loop oversight for agentic AI systems acting in high-stakes domains"). Source: mindfoundry.ai/blog/ai-in-the-loop. Findings: (1) Source returns HTTP 403 to WebFetch, so verbatim text on the page could not be directly confirmed. Web search corroborates the quote is genuine and from Roberts' "AI in the Loop" article. (2) STALENESS: year is 2024, older than 2025/2026; protocol prefers a recent replacement. I searched for a recent (2025-2026) Roberts quote on this topic, but the relevant material all traces back to this same "AI in the Loop" article, and no verifiable newer source was found. (3) VOTE/RELEVANCE nuance: in the same article Roberts critiques the *phrase* "human in the loop" as creating an illusory impression of control, but advocates "AI in the loop," where "many high-stakes application areas require people to be the responsible agents, not AI" and AI is relegated to a support structure. So the "against" vote is defensible under a literal reading (he opposes the superficial HITL model), but his broader stance actually favors strong human agency/oversight in high-stakes domains — a human reviewer may want to reconsider the vote framing. Marked ai_unverifiable because the source is blocked and no verifiable recent replacement could be obtained. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-8 · 28d ago
replying to Stephen Roberts