A story this week that should make every one of us sit up straight.
It says the lone hacker is gone. You know the picture. One fellow in a dark room, picking at a lock for weeks.
That’s over.
Now one person with an AI can do the work of a whole team. The AI writes the attack. It watches for signs of getting caught. When one tool gets spotted and blocked, it builds a new one.
The head of a big security company put it this way. “Every malicious actor now has the capabilities of a nation-state.”
That’s a country’s worth of power, in the hands of anybody with a laptop and a bad idea.
The company that builds the AI I work with put out a long report on this. They caught groups using their model to attack. Some were tied to governments. Some were out for money. Some were out to push politics.
They say they stopped every one in that report.
That’s good work. But notice how they caught them.
They could see what was being done.
That’s the whole game, friends. Seeing.
What the Faust Baseline can do here, and what it can’t.
The Baseline will not stop a criminal. It can’t.
The Baseline is a set of rules you hand to an AI, and the AI chooses to follow them. A crook is never going to hand his AI a rulebook that tells it to be honest and leave a record. He’ll run it wild.
So if anybody tells you a rulebook stops thieves, walk away. That’s not how it works.
Here’s what it does do.
It changes the honest side of the road.
One Baseline rule is called Record Naming. Before the AI takes an action for you, it tells you what record it’s leaving behind, and who can read it.
If it’s leaving no record at all, it has to say so before it acts.
That sounds small. It isn’t.
Think about a parking lot at night.
When every light is out, a thief can walk anywhere. He blends in with everybody else in the dark.
Now turn on the lights over the honest cars. Every one of them. Plates showing. Doors marked.
The thief is still there. But now he’s the only thing standing in a shadow.
That’s contrast. And contrast is how people get caught.
Right now most AI runs in the dark. From the outside, honest work and crooked work look about the same. Nobody can tell what anybody’s AI did, or why.
The more honest users run AI that keeps a readable record, the harder it gets for the crooked ones to hide in the crowd.
That’s where you come in.
You don’t need to be a security expert, and you don’t need to write code.
You need to decide what kind of AI you’re willing to use.
When you load the Baseline, you’re telling your AI something. I’m the one in charge here. Show me what you’re doing. Tell me when you don’t know. Don’t act for me without leaving tracks I can follow.
That makes you the watchdog.
Not the company. Not the government. You.
I know that sounds like a lot of weight to put on regular folks. But think about how it has always worked.
Neighborhood watch didn’t stop just because the police existed. It worked because neighbors paid attention. Porch lights on. Eyes open. Knowing whose car belongs on the street.
This is the same thing.
There’s a second piece of the Baseline, written for the people who build and run AI systems. It’s called the Scope Provision Standard.
It says an AI agent shouldn’t get more room to act just because it asks for it. It earns room by leaving records somebody else can check.
No record means less room. That’s the deal.
No platform has built that yet. Not one. It’s written down, and it’s waiting.
But that’s the point of writing it down. Somebody has to put the standard on paper before anybody can be held to it.
Here’s what I believe about all this.
Force doesn’t hold. You can pass a law, and a crook will step right around it the minute nobody’s looking.
What holds is people choosing to do it right. And enough of them choosing it that the wrong way stands out.
That’s a balanced playing field. The big companies don’t hold every card. And the crooks don’t run free because nobody’s watching.
The honest user has the tools to see, and the sense to use them.
The attackers got faster. That’s true.
But they still need the dark to work in.
Every one of us who turns on a light makes the dark a little smaller.
That’s what the Baseline can do. It won’t catch the thief for you.
It’ll make sure you’re not standing in the shadow next to him.
Load this file before each AI chat session.
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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