Expressed uncertainty

Added · Seed

Seeded from a cross-catalogue triage of six AI pattern libraries (references/ai-pattern-catalogues.md). Generated content's communicating-uncertainty stub sketches this; the move had no page of its own.

The system lets its confidence show — in wording, ranges, or marks on specific spans — so the actor knows which parts of the output stand on firm ground and which are guesses.

Resources & references

To-do

Generated content hosts the communicating-uncertainty stub and its demo; migrate as this matures. The calibration literature (whether displayed confidence tracks accuracy) should ground the false-precision force.

Consequences

  • confidence is part of the output's surface — hedged phrasing, ranges, marks on the doubtful spans — so the actor's scrutiny can land where it is actually needed
  • a number implies calibration that may not exist: "80% confident" is itself a generated claim, and precision in the mark overstates precision in the ground
  • hedging everything is as useless as asserting everything; the value is in the difference between the marked and the unmarked

Related patterns

Precedes

  • Cognitive forcing functions — confidence is part of the output's surface — hedged phrasing, ranges, marks on the doubtful spans — so the actor's scrutiny can land where it is actually needed

Serves

  • Assistance — expressed uncertainty covers assistance's signal-raising step — qualifying output so attention goes where confidence is thin

Enacts

  • Agency — the actor keeps the judgement that uniform fluency would otherwise take

Complements

  • Suggestion — a proposal's weight depends on how firm the ground under it is
  • Citation — how sure it is versus where it came from

Related

  • Explanation — the factors behind a prediction are one way of saying how much to trust it