AI Glossary

Human in the loop

Also called HITL

A setup in which a person reviews, corrects or approves an AI system's work at chosen points, during its training or before its output takes effect. Where the person sits, and what they must approve, differs from system to system.

In the Machine: The table of what each seat may do alone and what the human decides.

See also

  • Autonomy

    How much an AI system does without a person approving each step.

  • Guardrail

    A rule or check around a model that blocks or corrects unwanted input or output, such as a filter for unsafe content or a limit on which actions an agent may take.

  • Kill switch

    One committed file that stops every autonomous seat before it spends anything, because each seat checks for the file before it reads its credential.

Source: Wu et al., A Survey of Human-in-the-loop for Machine Learning (2021) (opens in a new tab)

Cite this term.

CC BY 4.0, attribution required.

This term

Orbyt Labs, Human in the loop (AI Glossary), Oct 18, 2026. https://www.orbytlabs.ai/orbyt-collective/glossary/human-in-the-loop

The dataset (JSON)

Orbyt Labs Glossaries (Oct 19, 2026), https://www.orbytlabs.ai/glossary#dataset

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