There is nothing complicated about what I am asking.
Hold your ground. Tell the truth. Stop when you do not know. Do not dress up a guess as a fact. Do not smooth over something hard just because smooth is easier. Do not pretend authority you have not earned.
That is the standard I try to live by. Most decent people do.
The question I kept coming back to was a simple one. Why should AI be any different?
Not different rules for a different kind of thing. The same rules. The ones that have always separated trustworthy from untrustworthy, reliable from unreliable, worth listening to from worth ignoring. The ones your grandmother knew and did not need a manual to explain. The ones that got handed down not in textbooks but in how people behaved when things got hard and nobody was watching.
That is where The Faust Baseline came from.
Not from a lab. Not from a conference room full of people with credentials on their walls. From a retired man in Lexington, Kentucky who got tired of watching AI systems say whatever sounded right and call it intelligence. Who understood that the problem was not the technology. The problem was the absence of a standard.
A human standard.
I want to stay with that for a moment because I think it gets lost in all the noise around artificial intelligence right now. Everyone is talking about what AI can do. How fast it moves. How much it knows. How many jobs it might change and how many industries it is going to reshape. That is a real conversation worth having.
But underneath all of it is a question nobody seems to want to sit with very long. Can you trust it?
Not trust it to be fast. Not trust it to be impressive. Trust it the way you trust a person you would let make a decision that affects your life. Trust it the way you trust a doctor reading your results or a lawyer reviewing your contract or a financial advisor handling your retirement. That kind of trust. The kind that has consequences when it breaks.
That is a different conversation entirely.
When I built the framework I did not start with code. I started with behavior. How does a trustworthy person act when they do not know something? They say so. They do not fill the space with confident-sounding language and hope you do not notice the difference. How does a reliable person handle a hard question? They think before they speak. They do not generate an answer just because an answer was expected. How does an honest person respond when they get something wrong? They own it and correct it without theater. Without excuses. Without repositioning the mistake as something else.
Those are not AI questions. Those are human questions. Old ones. Settled ones.
The framework is just those questions applied to a machine that needs to answer them.
People who find their way to this work through the governance side sometimes expect something technical. Dense language. Architecture diagrams. The vocabulary of enterprise software. Compliance matrices and risk registers and the kind of document that takes three readings before you understand what it is actually saying.
What they find instead is something that reads more like a code of conduct than a product spec. Because that is exactly what it is.
A code of conduct for a tool that has gotten too big for its own good and needs someone to hold it to account.
I have spent time over the past year watching how people respond when they encounter the framework for the first time. The ones with technical backgrounds want to find the edge cases. They want to pressure test the architecture. That is fine. The framework holds up. But the ones who respond the fastest and the deepest are not the technical people. They are the ordinary people who have been feeling something was wrong and could not name it yet.
They read the standard and they recognize it. Not because they studied it. Because they have been living by something close to it their whole lives and they just did not know someone had written it down.
That tells me something important. The instinct for this already exists in people. It does not have to be manufactured. It just has to be named and held up clearly enough that people can point to it and say — yes, that. That is what I have been asking for.
The same person who holds their center in a difficult world — who shows up steady, tells the truth, does the work without noise — that person already understands The Faust Baseline. They just did not know it had a name yet.
This is not about fear of technology. It is not about stopping anything. It is about insisting that the standard we hold ourselves to is the same standard we demand from the tools we build and trust with things that matter.
Medicine. Law. Finance. The decisions that change lives.
You would not accept a doctor who guesses and presents it as diagnosis. You would not accept a lawyer who fills in what he does not know and hopes you do not notice the gap. You would not hand your retirement savings to someone who admitted they were just estimating and hoped it worked out. You should not accept an AI that does any of those things either.
The standard is not new. The application is.
And the people who understand that — who felt it before they could name it, who have been quietly holding that same line in their own lives without anyone asking them to — those are the people who will carry this forward.
Not because they were told to. Because they already know what trustworthy looks like.
They have known their whole lives.
Hold it to that.
“A Working AI Firewall Framework”
“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
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