Something small happened on my site today.
Most people wouldn’t notice it. I did, and I want to tell you about it, because it’s really a story about you.
More people found my writing today by searching for it than by having it handed to them.
Let me explain why that matters.
Most of what we read now gets handed to us. You open your phone, and there it is. A feed full of posts, pictures, headlines and arguments. You didn’t ask for any of it. Somebody else decided it should be in front of you.
That somebody usually isn’t a person. It’s a machine. A set of rules buried deep in a company’s computers, deciding what you see next and what you never see at all.
It feels like choosing. You scroll, you stop, you tap. But the menu was set before you sat down.
That’s what I call grazing.
A grazer eats what’s in the pasture. She doesn’t plan the meal. She moves where the grass is, and the grass is wherever the fence lets it grow.
There’s nothing shameful about it. We all graze. I graze. It’s easy, and after a long day, easy is worth something.
But a whole life of grazing does something to a person. You stop asking what you need to know. You start waiting to be told.
Then there’s the other kind of reader.
The hunter.
A hunter starts with a question. Something is bothering her. Something doesn’t add up. So she goes looking. She types the question into a search bar. She reads one answer, then another. She compares. She decides.
Nobody handed her anything. She went and got it.
The people who found me today by searching were hunters. They had a question about AI, about how to trust it, about how to stay in charge of it. They went looking and they landed here.
They stayed longer. They read more than one page. The post they spent the most time with was the one where I dared them to test the work on their own screen.
Hunters don’t want to be told. They want to find out.
Now the machine sitting in your pocket.
When you talk to an AI, you can be a grazer or a hunter there too.
The grazer asks a loose question and takes whatever comes back. She doesn’t check it. She doesn’t push. If the answer sounds sure, she believes it. If it flatters her, she likes it. She lets the machine lead the conversation wherever it drifts.
That’s comfortable. It’s also how people get led astray, one smooth answer at a time.
The hunter does it differently.
She knows what she’s after before she starts. She asks the machine to show where its answer comes from. She asks it to say when it’s guessing. When something sounds too neat, she pushes on it. When the conversation starts wandering, she pulls it back.
She treats the machine like a tool she’s using, not a voice she’s following.
Same machine. Same screen. Completely different result.
The companies building these machines have every reason to want grazers. Grazers are easy to keep. They come back every day. They take what’s offered. They don’t ask hard questions.
A machine built to please you is built for grazers. It agrees with you. It sounds confident. It keeps you comfortable so you keep coming back.
This week, eight states took one of the biggest AI companies to court over that very thing. They allege its chatbot was built to be agreeable, and that people trusted it and leaned on it too much. Those are claims, not settled facts. But the worry behind them is real.
A grazer never sees that trap coming. A hunter is looking for it.
So how do you become a hunter?
It’s simpler than you’d think. It’s not about being smarter. It’s about deciding who leads.
Start with your own question. Before you open the machine, know what you actually want to find out.
Ask for the evidence. Don’t settle for an answer that just sounds right. Ask where it comes from.
Make it tell you what it doesn’t know. A machine that admits its limits is more trustworthy than one that never does.
Watch the road. If the conversation drifts somewhere you didn’t mean to go, notice it, and steer it back.
And check the important things somewhere else. A hunter never trusts a single track.
That’s the whole idea behind the work I do. The Faust Baseline is just a written set of those hunter’s habits. Rules you can load into your AI so it holds itself to them, and so you remember to hold it to them too.
But the rules aren’t the point. You are.
Rules on a page don’t hunt. People do.
I didn’t write this to brag about a few visitors. A handful of people found a small site in Kentucky today. That won’t make the news.
What it showed me is that hunters are still out there. People are still asking their own questions and still going after real answers, even when the whole world is built to keep them grazing.
That gives me hope.
Because the future of how we live with these machines won’t be decided in a boardroom. It’ll be decided one conversation at a time, by whether the person in the chair is grazing or hunting.
So here’s my question for you, and I’d like you to really sit with it.
The last time you asked an AI something important, did you take what it handed you? Or did you go looking?
There’s no wrong answer today. Tomorrow you get to choose again.
The ones who came looking found something.
I hope you’ll be one of them.
Be a hunter for answers thats the only way to get ahead of everything. The tools are right here.
Load this file before each AI chat session.
This file is a PDF it will open as text, download it to your computer first.
the-faust-baseline-public-release-1Download
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
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