Distilling Expert Judgment at Scale

Overview & Synopsis

Frontier AI models are increasingly deployed on topics where the stakes are high and expert judgment is required, including healthcare, defense, finance, governance, and politics. We present a general methodology for distilling expert human judgment into automated evaluation systems that operate at scale. Our approach assembles networks of domain experts and develops techniques for extracting not just their conclusions but their reasoning processes, encoding those processes into structured editorial standards that automated judges can apply continuously. We ground our approach in a long tradition of research on the nature of expertise and the conditions under which expert judgment is reliable and more effective than other approaches, and argue that independent, expert-calibrated evaluation is necessary not only on epistemic grounds but as a matter of accountability and public trust. We validate the methodology on AI news reporting as a first application domain. On source quality, two independent domain experts achieve Krippendorff's $α= 0.83/0.69$ on a held-out test set when applying the editorial standards, and our automated judge reaches $F1 = 0.81/0.97$ against expert consensus. On neutrality, experts achieve $α= .72$ on the test set, and the automated judge reaches $F1 = 0.86$ against expert consensus. Additionally, a controlled comparison shows that expert-calibrated judges substantially outperform uncalibrated frontier models on every source-quality metric, demonstrating that encoding expert reasoning is the critical step that prompt engineering alone cannot replace. We present this benchmark as a proof of concept for a broader evaluation infrastructure applicable to any domain where judgment matters and expertise is scarce.