The Loop Was Never Real: Why Human Oversight In AI Systems Isn't Changing Decisions

In a recent piece, I wrote about quiet drift, the way board oversight of AI systems fades after deployment, while the model continues learning, adapting and making calls no one is watching closely enough to catch. The most common response I heard was a version of the same reassurance: we have humans in the loop.

That response deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. Because in practice, the presence of human review and the existence of meaningful human oversight are not the same thing, and boards are routinely approving systems based on assurances that conflate the two.