Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing technology with its ability to process vast amounts of data and enable rapid and uniform insights. AI excels at multitasking and automating consistent decision-making. On the other hand, humans are subject to variability in these regards. Let’s be honest: we’re often slower to process information, have limited attention spans, and need to take breaks. So when you hear about human-in-the-loop (HITL) AI solutions, you may wonder: what’s the advantage?
But it’s important to understand that AI performance peaks when tasks are clearly defined—for instance, distinguishing whether a pedestrian is jumping a fence and attempting to break in or just walking along next to a facility for an evening stroll. AI efficiently resolves such routine scenarios using historical data. Rare, complex ‘edge cases’ it hasn’t seen before can be more challenging for AI to interpret correctly. For example, an AI weapon detection system will detect the rifles when a military honor guard arrives at a sporting event. However, a human in the loop who works at that site will be aware of the event and understand it is not a threat.
For these instances, integrating a human in the decision-making loop offers a practical and cost-effective solution, avoiding the complexities of developing more advanced AI systems that stray into the category of ‘overkill.’ Furthermore, these human-supervised AI systems can accommodate smaller or sparser training datasets. It doesn’t make sense to develop AI systems to account for every possible edge case because one thing that humans are still more efficient at than AI is figuring out how to respond to edge cases when they arise.
HITL enhances context, reliability, transparency, fairness, and trust for AI solutions
Human-in-the-loop oversight in AI governance addresses AI’s inherent limitations. It ensures that infrequent yet complex nuances and anomalies in various scenarios are identified and reviewed by humans while routine cases are processed autonomously.
Here are five key advantages of human governance in AI:
- Human Adaptability to Contextual Nuances: AI systems, while adept at general situations based on training, often miss exceptional cases. A human-in-the-loop (HITL) excels at managing these rare, unanticipated events.
- Mitigation of Bias: AI alone cannot recognize unrepresentative data or inherent biases. HITL can critically assess the broader context, identifying and correcting biases that may not be evident to the AI.
- Enhanced Accuracy and Reliability: Human feedback is crucial for AI refinement, especially when the goal is to emulate human decision-making. HITL plays a vital role in ensuring the AI’s judgments align with human standards, particularly for those uncommon edge cases.
- Increased Transparency: The ‘black box’ nature of AI decision-making processes often draws criticism. With HITL governance, there’s an added layer of human understanding, making AI decisions more transparent and comprehensible.
- Ethical Oversight and Public Trust: Given the initial skepticism towards AI, involving a human element in oversight can foster trust among stakeholders, ensuring responsible control and accountability.
Why human-in-the-loop AI solutions are essential for optimal performance
The complementary relationship between AI capability and human oversight is key to unlocking the full potential of intelligent systems. Implementing the right ratio of human-in-the-loop for otherwise autonomous AI solutions is strategically sound—a recognition of the delicate balance required for optimal performance.
Many AI solutions today misjudge how to layer HITL into their offering. Some shift virtually the entire burden to the technology itself, prescribing preset next actions based on what the AI models determine is relevant, which creates inflexibility. This system may react well in highly prescribed or controlled scenarios but doesn’t sufficiently account for the edge cases that exist in the real world. Others overcorrect the other way, sending too high of a percentage of the decision step to humans to process, introducing the inconsistencies and potential errors of human monitoring. Treating too many situations like edge cases is inefficient, especially in a time-sensitive use case like weapon detection.
SparkCognition Visual AI Advisor offers an approach that blends the benefits of our award-winning computer vision system with smart and configurable levels of human guidance. This approach ensures that humans have total visibility to all insights, with the most critical always escalated in real time to the correct stakeholders for awareness and action.
Leveraging AI’s efficiency in routine scenarios while acknowledging the irreplaceable human touch needed for unforeseen challenges ensures a harmonious relationship between intelligent automation and human intuition that businesses can use to create greater returns on their AI investments.
To learn more about SparkCognition Visual AI Advisor, browse our free webinar library or contact us for a demo.
This article was written by Jonathan Haslanger, Solutions Architect at SparkCognition.
