The Big Problem with Human in the Loop - Albanian Bus Edition

Some thoughts crossed my mind as I stood frustrated at the Tirana East bus station, waiting for a bus that would never come.

AI does not know what our “truth” is, or what our world looks like. It doesn’t know priorities, or understand human impacts when it gets answers wrong.

However, even when it is right, we don’t always recognize it because AI doesn’t fully speak our language.

When I asked “Are there any direct busses from Tirana East Gate bus station to Durres?” the answer appeared instantly. “Yes, there are direct buses!”

Confident and happy, I scrolled down to the end of the response. AI can be very wordy after all. It asked “Would you like a schedule? When would you like to depart?”

“Why yes I would, I would like to depart around 3pm.”

“Great! There are plenty of options around that time. Here are the companies.”

I arrived at the bus station around 3, and didn’t see a bus departing to Durres. So I asked someone.

“No, no, there are no busses to Durres from here. You have to go to the city center, the North/South station.”

I asked someone else - surely AI wouldn’t have let me down so badly. But the answer was the same.

Looking back, I see my error. I assumed that it knew what “direct” meant in this context. So I didn’t read the text it provided, and skipped directly to what I needed to know next. Had I been a good human in the loop, I would have read carefully and realized that “direct” meant I could take a local bus to the North/South station, and from there take an intercity bus to Durres.

The AI wasn’t completely wrong, but it wasn’t completely right. And it was my fault that I didn’t check the response carefully. Being a human in the loop isn’t a governance role, or a control. It is part of using AI effectively. It is human nature to skim responses and take what we want from interactions without fully listening, especially when we are stressed or hurried. AI should really force us to read carefully, to understand how it thinks, and to consider its limitations. As we move further into this AI era, and we learn new skills, we need to consider a focus on critical reading and thinking. Training ourselves to take the time to really assess the answers and output AI provides is going to help us to work with it better - and hopefully stop us from getting stranded at a bus stop far from home!