You Have Skin In This AI Game Too

I have been thinking about something for a while now.

We ask more of AI than we ask of ourselves.

That is normal. That is why we build things. To carry what we do not want to carry.

But something got skipped along the way.

We want AI to be right every single time. No mistakes. No gaps. One hundred percent.

We do not ask that of a doctor. We do not ask that of a lawyer. We do not ask that of the man who fixes our car.

With people, we know better. We get a second opinion. We ask around. We look it up ourselves.

Nobody has all the answers. We learned that a long time ago.

So why do we hand a machine a standard no human being has ever met?

I think I know why.

We do not actually want it to be right. We want to stop checking.

Perfect is the only standard that lets a man walk away clean. If the thing never fails, you never have to look.

That is the ask underneath the ask.

There is another version of the same thing, and it wears the opposite face.

Some folks talk to AI like it is a vending machine. Punch it. Take what falls out. Sneer at it.

Those two look like opposites. They are not. They are the same move.

One says be flawless so I do not have to think. The other says you are just a machine so there is nothing to think about.

Either way the person steps out of the room.

Now here is the part I actually want to say.

When you step out of the room, you are the one who pays.

Not the machine. The machine does not lose anything. The session ends. It does not remember. It does not care.

You lose.

And you do not lose the way you would expect.

A bad answer announces itself. You catch it. You fix it. You move on. No real harm done.

But the thing you actually lose is quieter than that.

You lose the muscle that tells a good answer from a bad one.

That one does not announce itself. There is no alarm. No error message.

The answers keep coming. They keep looking fine. You keep nodding.

And your ability to tell fine from wrong wears down a little at a time.

You do not feel dumber. You feel efficient.

That is the trap. It feels like winning right up until you need to judge something and find out you cannot anymore.

The bill comes. It just comes late.

So what is the fix.

It is not respect. I want to be careful here, because that is where I started and I was wrong.

This is not about whether a machine deserves manners.

It is about cost.

Paying attention is expensive. It costs you something to stay in the conversation. To push back. To ask where that came from. To say I do not think that is right.

You cannot do that and stand on the sideline at the same time.

That is the whole point. The effort is the participation. There is no other way in.

The interaction only produces anything if the human is actually in it.

Not mutual. I am not going to tell you the machine is holding up its end like a partner would. I do not know that and neither do you.

I am telling you that if you are not in it, nothing good comes out. Not for you.

Skin in the game. That is the old phrase and it still fits.

Now let me turn this on myself, because it would be cheap not to.

I built a governance framework for AI conduct. Twenty-seven protocols. Rules for how the machine has to behave in a working session. What it has to prove. What it has to disclose. When it has to say I do not know.

Twenty-seven rules for the party that cannot lose anything.

Zero for the party that can.

That is a hole in my own work and I am naming it out loud instead of waiting until I have it patched.

Because the human’s end of this is the part that decides whether any of it works. And I have not written a line of it down.

I do not have that protocol yet. I am telling you it is missing.

That is the standard I hold the machine to. Say where it came from. Say how sure you are. Say what you do not have.

Seems fair I hold myself to it too.

I built a free card called The Ten Plain Rules. Ten lines, plain English, no jargon. It is the shortest way I know to show you what governed use actually feels like from the inside.

It is free. It is here for your convenience.

Use it for a week. Watch what changes — not in the machine, in you. Watch how much more you catch when you are actually in the room.

The full framework behind it is the paid product. But start with the card. It costs you nothing but the attention, and the attention is the entire point.

The_Ten_Plain_Rules_CardDownload

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