When AI Requires Constant Human Monitoring, It’s Just Inefficiency in a High-Tech Costume & Why You Should Hire a Stenographer

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The Mirage of “Efficiency”

In the rush to adopt artificial intelligence across industries, the word most often dangled like a shiny lure is efficiency. Tech companies, courts, and even law firms are told that AI will streamline processes, save money, and eliminate human error. But here’s the paradox: when an AI system requires constant human oversight to function, it ceases to be efficient at all. It is, instead, inefficiency dressed up in a high-tech costume.

Courtrooms and depositions provide a crystal-clear example. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and digital recording companies market themselves as modern replacements for stenographic court reporters. Yet, time and again, the record they produce must be reviewed, corrected, and heavily monitored by humans. At that point, one must ask: why not hire the human expert in the first place?

AI Oversight – The Hidden Costs

AI transcription systems are often sold as “plug-and-play” solutions. Place a microphone in the room, let the software run, and—voilà—your transcript appears. Reality is far messier.

  • Error-Prone Outputs: Even the most advanced ASR struggles with overlapping speakers, accents, technical jargon, and poor audio quality.
  • Human “Correction Crews”: To make transcripts usable, teams of human editors must listen, correct, and reconstruct meaning. The very thing AI was supposed to replace—human labor—is reintroduced, but with an extra layer of inefficiency.
  • Risk of Misinterpretation: Unlike stenographers trained to capture every word with precision, AI can turn a critical statement into a nonsensical phrase, altering the record’s integrity.

This hidden human monitoring is labor-intensive, costly, and ironically, slower than hiring one trained stenographer to do the job right the first time.

Expertise Is Not an Add-On—It’s the Foundation

A stenographer isn’t just a human recorder. Court reporters are trained professionals who bring judgment, discretion, and adaptability to unpredictable environments.

  • On-the-Fly Clarification: A stenographer can stop proceedings to clarify if two people spoke over each other or if a critical word was missed. AI cannot.
  • Terminology Mastery: Reporters become fluent in the language of law, medicine, engineering, and finance—fields where precision isn’t optional.
  • Ethical Responsibility: Stenographers are officers of the court, sworn to impartiality and confidentiality. AI has no such ethical framework.

By hiring a stenographer, you aren’t just outsourcing a task. You’re bringing expertise into the room—the very expertise that AI vendors quietly admit they must replicate by employing armies of human reviewers.

The Inefficiency of AI in the Courtroom

Consider what happens when AI is deployed in a courtroom setting:

  1. Setup and Monitoring: Microphones must be placed, calibrated, and constantly adjusted. If the recording fails or interference occurs, the record is lost.
  2. Real-Time Monitoring: Staff must actively watch the system to ensure it’s capturing audio. Any lapse risks an incomplete record.
  3. Post-Production Editing: A transcript riddled with errors must be sent through human editors, consuming days or weeks.
  4. Verification Against the Audio: Attorneys and judges often demand verification of disputed phrases, leading to further delays and expense.

The promise of efficiency dissolves. What remains is a bloated workflow: technology pretending to be efficient while quietly multiplying the very labor it sought to replace.

Stenographers – Efficiency in Practice

By contrast, a stenographer provides:

  • Instant Readback: Attorneys can request immediate playback of testimony.
  • Real-Time Transcripts: Parties can see text on their screens as words are spoken, aiding strategy and comprehension.
  • Certified Accuracy: The transcript is legally recognized without needing layers of human correction.

In short, stenographers deliver true efficiency: accuracy in real time, without redundant human monitoring.

Risk, Liability, and the Question of Trust

Beyond inefficiency, there is a deeper issue at play: trust. In legal proceedings, the record is everything. An inaccurate transcript can derail appeals, jeopardize cases, and even deny justice.

  • Liability Exposure: If a court adopts AI and a transcript is found inaccurate, who is liable? The software vendor? The court? The attorneys? With stenographers, accountability is clear.
  • Privacy Concerns: AI transcription often requires cloud storage and external processing. Sensitive testimony—medical records, trade secrets, criminal confessions—may be exposed to third parties. Stenographers, bound by professional ethics, safeguard confidentiality.
  • Admissibility Challenges: Courts across the country have raised concerns about the admissibility of AI-generated transcripts, further complicating reliance on the technology.

Why gamble on an untested system that requires human babysitting, when the trusted alternative is readily available?

The Illusion of Cost Savings

AI is often touted as cheaper than stenography. But when you tally the hidden costs—human editing crews, lost time, liability risks, appeals due to inaccuracies—the illusion of savings evaporates.

A trained stenographer may appear more expensive up front, but in reality:

  • One expert replaces many: Instead of needing AI software, tech staff, and editors, you hire one person.
  • No redundancy required: With a stenographer, the record is captured once, cleanly and accurately.
  • Avoided legal costs: Preventing appeals and disputes saves immeasurable resources.

Cost-cutting measures that compromise the record are not savings at all—they’re deferred liabilities.

Bringing Expertise to the Table

The broader lesson applies beyond court reporting. AI can be powerful, but only when it enhances human expertise rather than trying (and failing) to replace it. In professions where accuracy and trust are non-negotiable, expertise must remain at the center.

Hiring a stenographer is not clinging to the past. It’s recognizing that true efficiency means putting the right expert in the right role. Just as you wouldn’t replace a surgeon with a robot that needs constant human correction, you shouldn’t replace a stenographer with a machine that introduces error at every step.

Efficiency Is Human

When AI requires constant human monitoring, it is nothing more than inefficiency cloaked in the rhetoric of innovation. The real solution lies not in outsourcing expertise to flawed technology but in embracing the professionals who have dedicated their careers to mastering it.

So the next time someone pitches AI transcription as the future of legal records, remember: efficiency is not about gimmicks or gadgets. It’s about getting the job done right, the first time.

Bring expertise to the table.
Hire a stenographer.

StenoImperium
Court Reporting. Unfiltered. Unafraid.

Disclaimer

The content of this post is intended for informational and discussion purposes only. All opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are based on publicly available information, industry standards, and good-faith concerns about nonprofit governance and professional ethics. No part of this article is intended to defame, accuse, or misrepresent any individual or organization. Readers are encouraged to verify facts independently and to engage constructively in dialogue about leadership, transparency, and accountability in the court reporting profession.

  • The content on this blog represents the personal opinions, observations, and commentary of the author. It is intended for editorial and journalistic purposes and is protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
  • Nothing here constitutes legal advice. Readers are encouraged to review the facts and form independent conclusions.

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Published by stenoimperium

We exist to facilitate the fortifying of the Stenography profession and ensure its survival for the next hundred years! As court reporters, we've handed the relationship role with our customers, or attorneys, over to the agencies and their sales reps.  This has done a lot of damage to our industry.  It has taken away our ability to have those relationships, the ability to be humanized and valued.  We've become a replaceable commodity. Merely saying we are the “Gold Standard” tells them that we’re the best, but there are alternatives.  Who we are though, is much, much more powerful than that!  We are the Responsible Charge.  “Responsible Charge” means responsibility for the direction, control, supervision, and possession of stenographic & transcription work, as the case may be, to assure that the work product has been critically examined and evaluated for compliance with appropriate professional standards by a licensee in the profession, and by sealing and signing the documents, the professional stenographer accepts responsibility for the stenographic or transcription work, respectively, represented by the documents and that applicable stenographic and professional standards have been met.  This designation exists in other professions, such as engineering, land surveying, public water works, landscape architects, land surveyors, fire preventionists, geologists, architects, and more.  In the case of professional engineers, the engineering association adopted a Responsible Charge position statement that says, “A professional engineer is only considered to be in responsible charge of an engineering work if the professional engineer makes independent professional decisions regarding the engineering work without requiring instruction or approval from another authority and maintains control over those decisions by the professional engineer’s physical presence at the location where the engineering work is performed or by electronic communication with the individual executing the engineering work.” If we were to adopt a Responsible Charge position statement for our industry, we could start with a draft that looks something like this: "A professional court reporter, or stenographer, is only considered to be in responsible charge of court reporting work if the professional court reporter makes independent professional decisions regarding the court reporting work without requiring instruction or approval from another authority and maintains control over those decisions by the professional court reporter’s physical presence at the location where the court reporting work is performed or by electronic communication with the individual executing the court reporting work.” Shared purpose The cornerstone of a strategic narrative is a shared purpose. This shared purpose is the outcome that you and your customer are working toward together. It’s more than a value proposition of what you deliver to them. Or a mission of what you do for the world. It’s the journey that you are on with them. By having a shared purpose, the relationship shifts from consumer to co-creator. In court reporting, our mission is “to bring justice to every litigant in the U.S.”  That purpose is shared by all involved in the litigation process – judges, attorneys, everyone.  Who we are is the Responsible Charge.  How we do that is by Protecting the Record.

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