Using AI the Right Way

Tool in Your Hand, Not Voice in Your Head

This morning I did two things that might look like they contradict each other.

I published a post telling you not to trust AI blindly. Then I spent time using AI to optimize that same post so more people could find it in search.

If you noticed that, good. Your instincts are working.

But here’s what I want you to understand. There is no contradiction there. What happened this morning is actually the clearest demonstration I can give you of what right looks like when it comes to AI.

I was in the driver’s seat the whole time.

The Difference Nobody Is Talking About

There are two ways people are using AI right now and the gap between them is enormous.

The first way is handing the wheel over. You ask the machine a question, it answers, you act. You let it write your thoughts, form your opinions, make your case. You treat the output like it came from someone who knows better than you do. You stop thinking and start following.

The second way is keeping the wheel in your hands. You use the machine to handle the mechanical work — the formatting, the research, the optimization, the first draft. But the judgment stays with you. The decision stays with you. The final word stays with you.

Same technology. Completely different relationship with it.

What a Tool Actually Is

I grew up around men who knew how to work. Real work. Hands and tools and the kind of judgment that only comes from experience.

A good carpenter doesn’t ask his hammer what to build. He knows what he’s building. The hammer does the driving. The man does the thinking.

That sounds simple. It is simple. But somewhere between the first AI chatbot and today, a lot of people forgot it.

The machine is the hammer. You are the carpenter. The moment you start asking the hammer for its opinion on the design, you’ve lost the thread.

AI is extraordinarily good at the mechanical layer of thinking. It can process information faster than any human alive. It can find patterns, generate options, format output, and handle repetitive tasks with zero fatigue. That is genuinely useful. I use it every day and I am not shy about saying so.

But it has no wisdom. It has no experience. It has no stake in your outcome. It cannot tell you what matters or why. It cannot weigh what you’ve lived against what it calculated. It cannot sit across from you and look you in the eye and tell you the hard truth.

That is your job. That has always been your job. AI didn’t take it from you. You just have to decide not to give it away.

What This Morning Actually Looked Like

Here’s the honest account of what happened.

I had a post ready. I knew what I wanted to say. The argument was mine — built from years of watching people interact with technology and making my own mistakes along the way. I wrote it the way I write everything, in my own voice, from my own point of view.

Then I used AI to help me think about how to position it in search. What keyword phrase would match what people are actually looking for. How to write a meta description that gives a reader enough to decide if the post is worth their time. Mechanical work. Optimization work. The kind of task that used to require a specialist and now takes ten minutes.

The post didn’t change. The argument didn’t change. My voice didn’t change. What changed was the packaging — the technical layer that helps the right readers find it.

That is the tool in your hand. It did the work I pointed it at. The thinking was mine before I opened the platform and it was mine after I closed it.

Where People Go Wrong

I want to be specific about this because vague warnings don’t help anyone.

People go wrong the moment they outsource their judgment.

Not their research. Not their formatting. Not their first draft when they’re stuck and need somewhere to start. Those are legitimate uses and I’d be a hypocrite to say otherwise.

The line is judgment. Opinion. The conclusion you reach after weighing everything you know against everything the situation requires. That is the part that has to stay human.

When you ask AI what you should think about something, you’ve crossed the line. When you take its output and present it as your own reasoned position without actually reasoning through it yourself, you’ve crossed the line. When you stop questioning the answer because the machine sounded confident, you’ve crossed the line.

Every one of those moments is a small surrender. And small surrenders have a way of becoming permanent ones if you don’t catch them early.

The Standard Worth Keeping

I built a governance framework for working with AI called The Faust Baseline. The whole architecture of it comes down to one principle held consistently.

The human stays in charge.

Not in a theoretical way. Not in a policy document that nobody reads. In the actual moment when the machine gives you an answer and you have to decide what to do with it. That moment is where the standard either holds or it doesn’t.

Tool in your hand. Not voice in your head.

Say it a few times. Let it settle. Then open whatever AI platform you use and work from that position every single time.

That is the right way. It’s not complicated. It just requires you to keep showing up as the person in charge of your own thinking.

Nobody is going to do that for you. The machine certainly won’t.

A New Category: “AI Baseline Governance”

“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack