Keeping an Eye on AI: A Framework for Effective Human Oversight of AI Systems
Abstract
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in high-risk, decision-making scenarios presents technical, safety, and normative challenges; problems that may only be ameliorated by human oversight. However, notions of human oversight lack a common foundational understanding: oversight architectures are not well defined, the roles involved remain unclear, and implementation steps are opaque. Hence, researchers and practitioners struggle to determine how to design, implement, and evaluate systems that enable effective human oversight. This paper advances a practical framework for effective human oversight of AI systems, based on a cross-disciplinary perspective that draws on insights from computer science, human-computer interaction, psychology, philosophy, and law. The core contributions are: (1) a foundational framework, with a working definition, architecture and processes for effective human oversight of AI systems; (2) an initial template for documenting oversight architectures and processes, applied to diverse domains; and (3) a synthesis of open research challenges that need to be considered in the emerging field of effective human oversight of AI systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.16278,
title = {Keeping an Eye on AI: A Framework for Effective Human Oversight of AI Systems},
author = {Susanne Gaube and Markus Langer and Tim Miller and Kevin Baum and Raimund Dachselt and Anna Maria Feit and Ujwal Gadiraju and Harmanpreet Kaur and Mark T. Keane and Richard Landers and Johann Laux and Q. Vera Liao and Brian Lim and Linda Onnasch and Tim Schrills and Liz Sonenberg and Chenhao Tan and Nava Tintarev and Ziang Xiao and Hanwei Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.16278},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
The conceptual analysis for this work was undertaken by the authors at Dagstuhl seminar 25272 'Challenges of Human Oversight: Achieving Human Control of AI-Based Systems' (https://www.dagstuhl.de/25272), held at Schloss Dagstuhl (June 29th-July 4th, 2025)