The Human-in-the-Loop Principle
This is a member-only chapter. Log in with your Signal Over Noise membership email to continue.
Log in to readModule 5 · Section 8 of 11
The Human-in-the-Loop Principle
I keep three things fully manual and I don’t plan to automate them:
Topic selection. The editorial judgement about what to write is the core of what makes a newsletter worth reading. Automating it would produce a newsletter that covers whatever the AI thinks is popular, which is not the same as what I think my readers need.
The outline. Structure is argument. How you organise information is a position. An AI-generated outline reflects a statistical sense of what essay structures look like, not an editorial sense of what this particular argument needs.
The final send decision. I review every issue in Kit.com before it goes. Not because I expect to find problems at this point — I usually don’t — but because the once-over is a commitment. I’m saying “yes, this represents me and my standards.” Fully automated sends would remove that accountability.
Everything else is automatable with the right setup, but I’d rather keep these three checkpoints than optimise them away.