Approval — Who Accepts This?
3. Standards, not plausibility
The failure mode here is specific, and it does not feel like failure.
AI output arrives well-formatted, internally consistent, and confident. A reviewer without a written standard falls back on the only test available — does this seem right? — and fluent wrong work passes that test easily.
| Against plausibility | Against a standard | |
|---|---|---|
| The question | Does this seem right? | Does this meet the stated criteria? |
| Passes | Anything fluent | Only what qualifies |
| Fails silently | Constantly | Rarely — a criterion is either met or not |
| Requires | Nothing written | The standard, written before the work |
A criterion that cannot be checked mechanically will drift. If the reviewer must exercise judgment about what the standard means, they will exercise it differently on a Friday than on a Monday — and differently again at volume.
High-reliability organizations describe this as reluctance to simplify. The pressure in an AI-augmented workflow runs the other way: the tidy version arrives pre-formatted, and accepting it is the cheapest available action.