Passive consent
Passive consent is accepting an AI decision because reviewing it costs too much.
Cookie banners taught people to press yes without reading. AI now asks the same of design, writing and code.
Passive consent has three steps:
- The AI makes a decision.
- Reviewing that decision is too slow, too hard or too unclear.
- You accept it, and it goes out under your name.
Nobody forced this. That is why it is hard to see. You feel that you approved the work, and in a narrow sense you did. But an approval you could not really evaluate tells nobody anything.
Researchers call one part of this automation bias: people trust what a machine proposes more than they should. Passive consent adds a second cause. Even when you doubt the AI, it can be too painful to do anything about it.
The cure is not to review everything. The cure is to make the reviews that matter cheap enough to do well.