Slang & Culture
Verification tax
The arduous task of checking that AI output is accurate, safe and usable, which can create a human bottleneck that offsets automation gains. It includes the time spent cross-referencing AI claims against ground-truth data, fixing errors and tidying up the final result.
Origin · no single documented coiner
Popularized in late 2026 by articles in the New York Times and Fast Company; the term describes the invisible human labor required to audit AI-generated work. No single documented coiner.