Before Judgment. How artificial intelligence can change the problem before a human

Abstract

Human oversight is commonly placed near the end of an artificial-intelligence-assisted decision: a system produces an analysis and a person reviews it before action. This assumes that the human reaches judgment with an independently formed account. Yet artificial intelligence can participate earlier by selecting information, organising relevance, proposing causes and shaping the language through which a problem becomes intelligible. Final authority may remain human while the decision object has been partly constructed elsewhere. This article proposes the concept of judgment-object divergence. It develops one specific mechanism, latent-intent hypothesis divergence, in which humans and artificial-intelligence systems generate, retain and weight different explanations involving concealed goals, incentives, status, deception, fear, loyalty, retaliation or strategic conduct. Recent research already establishes the broader territory of epistemic mediation, changed problem formulation, representational gaps and weakened epistemic agency. The contribution here is to connect those findings to the behavioural hypotheses that shape ambiguous strategic situations and to show why final human approval may preserve authority in form while failing to preserve independent judgment in function.