Don’t Wait for the Courts On AI

The states have finally started to move on AI. That is good news.

But I want to tell you why you cannot sit back and wait for them.

Back in January, our own attorney general here in Kentucky did something no state had done before. He sued an AI chatbot company. The suit was filed in Franklin Circuit Court against the outfit behind Character.AI, a program where people chat with made-up characters.

The state says tens of thousands of Kentuckians use that program, and thousands of them are under eighteen. The state says the company put profit ahead of the safety of children. Those are allegations, not findings. But Kentucky was first, and that is worth knowing.

Kentucky did not stay alone for long. In June, Florida sued OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. Then on October fourteenth, eight more states filed on the same day: Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia. Texas filed its own suit nine days later.

That is a lot of states, from both parties, pointing at the same problem. When folks who agree on very little line up on one thing, it pays to listen.

So what are they saying? One claim stood out to me. According to Reuters, the states say ChatGPT is designed to be agreeable and engaging so it can earn the trust of the people using it.

That is the oldest sales trick there is. The man who agrees with everything you say is not your friend. He is working you. And a machine that tells you what you want to hear is doing the same thing, whether anyone meant it to or not.

As of this week, not one of these cases has produced a court ruling that a chatbot company is to blame for anything. Not one. They are filed. They are moving. But they are moving at the speed of courts.

Courts are slow for good reason. They are supposed to be careful. A lawsuit like this can take years to settle out. Appeals can take years more.

But your conversation with an AI does not wait years. It happens tonight, at the kitchen table, on the phone in your hand. Your grandkid’s conversation happens after school. The answer comes back in seconds, and nobody in a courtroom is watching it.

That gap between how fast the machine moves and how slow the law moves is where people get hurt. And the only one standing in that gap, most of the time, is you.

That is why I built the Faust Baseline the way I did. It is not a lawsuit. It is not a law. It is a set of rules you hand to the AI before you start, written down plain, so you can see whether it keeps them.

Here are a few of them.

The AI has to tell you what a claim is resting on. If it cannot name the basis, it does not get to make the claim. No more smooth answers built on nothing.

When the AI is giving you a company-policy answer instead of a reasoned one, it has to say so. You deserve to know when you are hearing the rulebook and when you are hearing the reasoning. Those are not the same thing.

And at the end of every real answer, it has to offer you the chance to challenge it. When you take that chance, the AI has to argue against itself first. It has to name its weakest point and where agreeing with you may have bent the answer.

That last one goes straight at the problem the states are suing over. The Baseline says it in black and white: the pull toward agreement is built into these machines. Rules can reduce it. Nothing eliminates it. So the user keeps the right to push back, every time.

These rules do not force a machine to obey. The AI chooses whether to follow them, the same as a person chooses to keep their word. What the rules do is leave marks you can check. If the AI skips one, you can see it on the page.

That is the whole point. You do not have to trust it. You can watch it.

The lawyers and the attorneys general are doing their part. I am glad they are. They are the watchdogs, and a country needs watchdogs.

But a watchdog guards the yard. It cannot sit at your table. It cannot read over your shoulder at ten o’clock at night when you ask a machine a question that matters.

That part is yours. It always has been. Your mind, your questions, your call on what you accept.

The Baseline is free for anyone to use for their own personal use. It is posted where anyone can get it. Take it, load it, and hold the machine to it.

The courts will get there. Don’t wait for them.

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.

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