Human-in-the-loop – DK Consulting of Colorado

After viewing my recent International Project Management Day presentation on Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) practices, an attendee asked a simple but profound question:

“This all makes sense. But how do we actually implement it?”

That question has stayed with me.

I expended a lot of energy in 2025, through blog posts and presentations, describing the limitations of generative AI (GenAI) in practical applications. But it’s one thing to agree that generative AI introduces risk. It’s another to design workflows that preserve human judgment in the presence of fluent, confident, probabilistic systems.

Now the designers of GenAI have jumped into the fray. Recently, Anthropic issued a public statement regarding the U.S. Department of Defense’s use of Claude. The statement included this line:

“…without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained professional troops exhibit every day.”

The domain there is defense. Ours is content, strategy, and project leadership. But the principle transfers cleanly.

AI systems do not exercise judgment. Humans do.

The risk in everyday professional environments is not that GenAI will launch weapons. The risk is quieter: that we gradually outsource evaluation, synthesis, and dissent. That we begin to accept fluency as understanding. That we mistake coherence for truth.

In last month’s post, I examined the effects of cognitive shortcuts—automation bias, and confirmation bias—that can crop up in our use of GenAI. But the deeper concern isn’t simply bias. It is the potential erosion of critical thinking.

If GenAI reduces friction, we must intentionally reintroduce the right kind of friction.

In this post, I’ll explore:

Why AI-assisted workflows can quietly weaken critical thinking
Where Human-in-the-Loop fits along the spectrum of human–AI collaboration
What Cognitive Forcing Functions (CFFs) are—and what recent research says about their impact
Practical ways to design cognitive friction into professional workflows

The goal is not to slow AI adoption. It is to ensure that efficiency does not come at the expense of judgment.

I was once approached by an extremist organization to desktop-publish some racist content for their upcoming event. I was a new mom running a business on a shoestring budget out of an unused storefront in the same town where I had attended university. Members of the extremist organization had been recently accused of complicity in the murder of a local talk-radio show host in a nearby city.

It was the mid-1980s.

If the political environment sounds all too familiar, so should the ethical situation.

Just as desktop publishing once made it easy to mass-produce messages—ethical or not—GenAI tools today offer unprecedented avenues to content production speed and scale. But the ethical question for content professionals remains: Should we use these tools simply because we can? And if we must use them, how do we use them ethically?

Ultimately, I did not use my skills or my business to propagate the extremists’ propaganda. Nor did I confront them the next day when they returned. On advice from my husband, a member of a minority group in the U.S., I told them I was too busy to turn around their project in the time they requested. This had a kernel of truth to it. I also referred them to a nearby big-box service, whose manager had told me over the phone the night before that she was not empowered to turn away such business (even if she wanted to). Not my most heroic moment.

I am not asking my fellow technical communicators to be especially heroic in the world of GenAI. But I think we should find an ethical stance and stick with it. Using GenAI ethically doesn’t have to be about rejecting the tools; however, it should be about staying alert to risk, avoiding harm, and applying human judgment where it matters most.

In this blog post, I outline the elements of using GenAI ethically and apply ethical principles to real-world scenarios.

Tag: Human-in-the-loop

Critical Thinking and GenAI: Why Human-in-the-Loop Needs Cognitive Friction

Ethical Use of GenAI: 10 Principles for Technical Communicators

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