# What is human-in-the-loop?

> Human-in-the-loop means a person reviews or can stop an AI system's output before it takes effect, not the system acting alone.

Source: https://meshin.co/glossary/human-in-the-loop
Updated: 2026-10-02

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## Why it comes up

It comes up whenever an AI system's decision touches something real: a loan, a job application, a support case, a medical or safety-adjacent judgement. A customer's legal team wants to know whether a person can catch and correct a bad output before it reaches someone affected. That is not the same as a person being "involved" in some vague sense. A board asks after seeing an automated system make a costly call nobody had reviewed.

## What to do about it

Decide, system by system, where full automation is fine, a wrong answer that costs little and is easy to reverse. Decide, too, where a person must review before anything takes effect. Where a person is in the loop, give them enough time and context to catch a bad output. A rubber-stamp screen that exists only to tick a box does not count. Record which category each system falls into in the AI register.