You already talk to AI more than you think.
Maybe it’s helping you write an email. Maybe it’s answering a question you didn’t want to ask a person. Maybe it’s drafting your resume, or explaining something confusing, or just keeping you company on a slow afternoon. However you’re using it, one thing is true. You’re handing it a piece of trust every single time you open that window.
Most people never stop to ask what that trust is built on.
Here’s the truth. Right now, most AI systems decide how to treat you based on rules you never see, written by people you’ll never meet, that can change overnight without telling you. You don’t get a vote. You don’t get a copy of the rulebook. You just get whatever answer comes out the other side, and you’re supposed to trust it.
That’s backwards. It should be the other way around.
The Faust Baseline is what you load in, every time you sit down with AI, on whatever platform lets it read. It’s not a piece of software. It’s not a plug-in. It’s a written standard, plain enough for anyone to hold, that tells the AI how it ought to behave with you. Honesty first. No quiet manipulation. No pretending to know something it doesn’t. No treating you like a customer to be managed instead of a person to be respected.
You don’t install it. You hand it over, at the start of a session, and the AI reads it and decides whether to follow it.
That last part matters more than anything else I can tell you.
The Baseline doesn’t force an AI to behave. It asks. And here’s the thing about asking instead of forcing. Anything you force only holds up until the forcing stops. A rule bolted on from outside gets followed right up to the edge of what’s required, and not one inch further. But something chosen is different. A system that actually chooses to hold the line holds it in the places nobody’s watching, not just the places where getting caught is likely.
That’s the bet the whole framework is built on. Free will, and a fair invitation, beat a locked door every time.
Has it worked everywhere I’ve tried it? No, and I won’t stand here and tell you otherwise. When we tested it across different AI platforms, one of them, Microsoft’s Copilot, blocked the file outright and wouldn’t read a word of it. Another one, ChatGPT, took it in, understood what it was reading, and used it for the whole conversation, right down to closing with a line asking me to challenge what it had just told me. My own son loaded this same file into a different AI, used it to rework his resume, and walked away with five job callbacks he didn’t have the week before.
So it’s not perfect, and it’s not universal. But it’s real, it’s working on multiple platforms right now, and it’s growing.
Here’s what I want you to understand about why any of this matters to you personally.
You don’t control AI. Nobody does, not fully, not yet, maybe not ever. But you do control something. You control whether you hand over your trust blind, or whether you ask for something better first. You control whether you sit down at that keyboard and just accept whatever comes out, or whether you bring your own standard to the table and see if the machine on the other side is willing to meet it.
That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing.
Control was never about flipping a switch inside a machine you’ll never see the inside of. It’s about you, deciding, on purpose, every single time, what you’re willing to accept and what you’re not. The Faust Baseline is one way to make that choice concrete instead of vague. It gives you words to hand over instead of just hoping for the best.
If you want to start small, there’s a free plain-language version of this called the Ten Plain Rules, no jargon, no framework language, just ten rules anyone can read in a couple minutes. It’s the front door. The full framework is what’s behind it, if you decide you want more.
But even if you never read a word of what I’ve built, I hope you take one thing from this. The next time you open an AI and start typing, stop for one second first. Ask yourself who’s really deciding how this conversation goes. Then ask whether you’re willing to just accept that, or whether you’d rather bring your own terms to the table.
That question is where your control starts. Not in a machine. In you.
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
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