Yesterday, TechRadar published the results of a survey. A thousand people, asked about their AI habits, compared against the same questions a year ago.
The headline number: heavy AI use fell 31% in twelve months. And the people who don’t touch AI at all jumped 24% — nearly a third of everyone surveyed now.
The easy read is that the shine wore off. People got bored. The novelty faded.
The easy read is wrong, and the survey’s own numbers prove it.
Look at why people said they’re pulling back. Privacy concerns topped the list at 32%. A preference for human interaction came second at 31%. Fear of becoming too dependent on the technology: 26%. Worry that AI will misrepresent their voice — their words, their personality — in things like emails: 24%.
Now read those again slowly, because not one of them says the technology doesn’t work.
Nobody in that list said AI is dumb. Nobody said it failed at the task. Skepticism about whether AI can even be helpful ranked near the bottom at 14%, and it dropped 21% from last year. People know the machine is capable. That’s not the problem.
The problem is the deal.
Privacy worry, in plain words: I don’t know what this thing does with what I tell it. Dependence worry: I don’t know where the tool ends and I begin. Voice worry: this thing speaks for me, and I never set the terms of how.
Those are not complaints about a machine. Those are complaints about an arrangement. An unwritten one.
Think about how you’d act if a stranger offered you a deal with no stated terms. Helpful fellow, capable, always available — but you don’t know what he does with what you tell him, you can’t tell how much of your work is becoming his, and sometimes he answers your mail in your name without asking how you’d say it.
You’d do exactly what a thousand people just did. You’d step back from the table. Not because the fellow can’t work. Because nobody wrote the deal down.
That’s what this survey caught. People aren’t quitting AI. They’re quitting the unwritten deal.
And here’s the part worth marking with a date. The answer to an unwritten deal has never been mysterious. It’s the oldest technology humans own: write the terms down.
That’s what a contract is. Stated terms, visible conduct, a kept record. It’s how strangers have trusted each other for thousands of years, and it works on a machine for the same reason it works on a man — because trust doesn’t come from the other party being good. It comes from the terms being stated and the conduct being checkable.
The Faust Baseline has run on that footing since before May 2025. Twenty-two written protocols. Every rule on the page, every session on the record, every claim dated at intelligent-people.org. This very morning — one day after that survey published — a standing page went up titled The Human Contract With AI, saying in plain words what those thousand respondents said in percentages: if you work with AI, you already have a contract with it. The only question is who wrote yours.
The survey is a thousand people answering that question. Somebody else wrote it. And they don’t like the terms.
There’s one more number in that survey that tells the future. The people most familiar with the technology — readers of tech publications — use AI at roughly double the rate of everyone else. Familiarity isn’t breeding contempt. It’s breeding use. Which means the pullback isn’t about the machine at all. The people who understand the arrangement best are the ones most comfortable inside it.
That’s the whole lesson in one line: people don’t fear AI. They fear an arrangement they never got to read.
Write the terms down and the fear has nowhere to live. The privacy question gets an answer on paper. The dependence question gets house rules. The voice question gets an owner holding the pen.
A thousand people just asked for a contract. They didn’t use the word. They didn’t have to. Every worry on that list is the same sentence spoken four different ways: show me the terms.
The terms exist. They’ve been public, dated, and working for over a year.
The house rules are written. The public is asking to read them.
We have the contract, just click the purchasing page here if you want to read it.
Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
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