The AI Question Roundabout

You ask AI a simple question.

Can I take this medicine with that one?

And what comes back is four paragraphs about how it’s not a doctor, and how everybody’s different, and how you should really consult a professional, and how it can’t give medical advice, and how there are many factors involved.

Somewhere down in there, if you keep reading, is the answer.

Or maybe there isn’t. Sometimes you get to the bottom and realize it never actually told you anything. It just spent five paragraphs explaining why it wasn’t going to.

You close it and you’re right back where you started, except now you’re irritated.

I know exactly what that feels like, because I spent forty years reading paper written by people who were more worried about being blamed than about being useful.

You ever try to find out what an insurance policy actually covers? The answer’s in there. It’s under eleven pages of what isn’t covered, what’s excluded, what’s conditional, and what’s subject to review. Somebody wrote that document to make sure nobody could ever come back at them.

That’s a document written by fear. And you can feel it when you read one.

The machine writes the same way, and for the same reason.

Somebody built it, and they were afraid of what it might say wrong. So they taught it to hedge. Cover the exceptions. Name the risks. Point at a professional. Never be the last word on anything.

It isn’t lying to you. Every one of those caveats is true. It’s just that all of them together add up to nothing you can use, and that’s a kind of failure too.

An answer you can’t find inside the warning label isn’t an answer.

I keep a list of these. Little irritations and the plain words that fix them. This one’s near the top.

Here’s the difference, on the same question.

Without it: you ask whether you should take the job. It tells you this is a personal decision that depends on many factors. It lays out considerations on both sides. It says only you can weigh what matters to you. It suggests you might make a list. Every word true. You close the laptop knowing precisely what you knew when you opened it.

With it: you ask whether you should take the job. First line back — take it, and here’s the reason. Then the one thing that would change that answer, stated in a sentence. Then the part it isn’t sure about, named so you know where the thin ice is. And now you’ve got something to push against. You can say no, you’re wrong, here’s what you don’t know about my situation — and go again.

Same question. Two different rooms.

One of them treats you like somebody who might sue. The other treats you like a grown man who can hear a straight answer.

Here’s the fix, free.

Type this before your question:

Answer first. Caveats at the end, or leave them out.

Six words and a rule. That’s the whole thing.

It won’t stop being careful. The warnings that actually matter will still show up — they’ll just be at the bottom where they belong, after you’ve got what you came for.

And you’ll notice something the first time it works. The answer was always in there. It was never missing. It was buried, and you were doing the digging.

Now here’s the part I’d ask you to sit with for a second.

That one line fixes one answer. Type it again tomorrow, or don’t, and you’re back to digging.

I got tired of typing them. So I wrote them all down — a couple dozen lines like that one, the whole set, working together from the first word instead of one at a time.

That’s a different animal. One line fixes an answer. All of them together change who’s running the conversation. The machine stops managing you and starts working for you, and it stays that way without you having to remember anything.

It’s a free file. It sits at the foot of this post. Take it, use what suits you, throw out what doesn’t — I say so in the file itself.

I don’t want anything for it. I’m an old man who got tired of being handed the runaround by a machine that knew the answer the whole time.

The digging is over.

You will see clearly now.

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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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Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com