Human Evaluation and Preference
Automated metrics and LLM judges are scalable proxies for the thing that actually matters: whether a human finds the output good. Human evaluation is the ground truth those proxies are calibrated against — and getting it right is its own discipline, full of subtle traps around agreement, bias, and how you ask the question. This post is about doing human eval well, and about how human preference became the signal that trains models themselves.
Automated metrics and LLM judges are scalable proxies for the thing that matters: whether a human finds the output good. Human evaluation is the ground truth those proxies are calibrated against — a discipline full of traps around agreement, bias, and how you ask — and human preference is now the signal that trains models themselves.