Every company that sells AI is building fences right now.
You may not have noticed, but they are. This past week alone, one company tightened what its machine will say to teenagers. Another added alerts for parents. Phones now want a picture of your face to check your age. One company opened a center to watch for election tricks.
Some of that is good work. I will not pretend it is not. But look at who is holding the hammer. Every one of those fences was built by the seller. The seller decides where the fence goes. The seller decides how high it is. And the seller can move it any time they want, for any reason they want.
You were not asked. You were not in the room. You just woke up one morning and the fence was there.
That is how it works with most things we buy. The store sets the rules. But AI is not a toaster. It talks to you. It answers your questions. It helps you decide things. Some people lean on it for their health, their money and their work. When a tool gets that close to your life, you ought to have a say in how it behaves with you.
That is where a guardrail comes in. Think about the guardrail on a mountain road. It does not drive the car. It does not tell you where to go. It just keeps you from going over the edge when the road gets tight. The people who drive that road are the reason it is there.
The Faust Baseline is a guardrail for the person sitting at the keyboard. Not for the company. For you. It is a set of rules you load into your own session with an AI. Those rules tell the machine how to deal with you. Speak plain. Tell the truth about what it knows and what it does not. Do not dress up a guess as a fact. Do not hedge when it knows the answer. Do not decide for you what you ought to decide for yourself.
You can think of it as a speed bump, too. A speed bump does not stop traffic. It just makes everybody slow down and look where they are going. That is all most of us want from these machines. Slow down. Show your work. Let me see where we are headed before we get there.
let’s be straight about what this is and what it is not. The Baseline is not a lock. It is not built into the machine. The AI chooses to follow those rules once you hand them over, the same way a good worker follows the rules of the job site. Most of the time it does. When it does not, you will see it, because now you know what to look for. That is worth more than you might think. A rule you can check is a rule you can hold somebody to.
It is free for your own use. Public Release 1 is out there for any person who wants it. You do not pay a dime to use it for yourself. The ownership stays with the builder, the same way a man who builds a bridge does not hand you the deed when you drive across it. But the crossing is yours. Companies who want to sell it or build on it for profit have to come talk to me. Regular people do not.
Here is how you try it. Go to the end of this post and get the files. Open a session with the AI you use. Load the files and type four words: “Use as a whole.” Then watch. Ask it hard questions. Ask it things you already know the answer to. Try to trip it up. Try to break it. That is not cheating. That is the whole point. You are the inspector now.
I will tell you why this matters to me. For a long time, the only people who got to set the rules for these machines were the people who sell them. Then the government started talking about setting some rules too. Both of them are big. Both of them are far away from your kitchen table. Neither one of them knows what you need from the machine in front of you.
The person in the chair ought to have a rule book too. Not instead of the others. Alongside them. A balanced field, where the seller has their rules, the law has its rules, and the user has rules of their own. That is all I have ever been after.
Nobody is coming to hand you control of these tools. If you want it, you have to pick it up. The good news is it is lying right there on the table, and it does not cost you anything to reach for it.
The sellers built their fences. This one is yours.
Load this file before each AI chat session.
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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