AI and The Hailstorm

Ever ask AI a simple question and get a warning label instead?

You know the one. You type something you’d ask a neighbor over the fence. And what comes back reads like the back of a medicine bottle.

Here’s how it went for me.

We had a hailstorm come through. Not a bad one. But I got up on a ladder afterward and looked at the roof, and there were dents in the flashing and some grit in the gutters that wasn’t there the week before. Shingles looked tired in a way they hadn’t the month before.

Now, I’ve been around building my whole life. I know what a beat-up roof looks like. What I didn’t know was whether I should call the insurance company about it.

The one thing everybody who owns a house eventually learns. Sometimes calling costs you more than the repair. You file a claim, and it goes on a record somewhere, and next year the premium comes back higher and you’re worse off than if you’d just paid the man yourself.

So that was my question. Should I call, or should I just eat it?

I typed it into the AI.

And what I got back was three paragraphs before it said anything at all.

It told me it wasn’t a licensed insurance professional. It told me coverage varies by state and by carrier. It told me I should review my policy documents. It told me it couldn’t give me specific advice about my situation. It told me to consult a qualified agent.

Then, way down at the bottom, in a sentence I almost scrolled past, it finally mentioned the thing I actually needed to know.

I sat there with my glasses pushed up on my head and I thought, you knew that the whole time. You knew it before you typed the first word. Why’d you make me dig for it?

I keep a list of these. Things the machine does that put a burr under my saddle. This one’s near the top of it.

And I’ll tell you why it happens, because it isn’t the machine being coy.

It’s covering itself. Somewhere in how it was built, it learned that the safe move is to say what it can’t do before it says what it can. Warnings first. Answer later. Maybe. Because a warning can never be wrong, and an answer can.

That’s a machine protecting itself. Not a machine helping you.

Now let me show you the two sides of it, because that’s the part that matters.

Without the fix, it goes like this. You ask whether to call your insurance about a hail-damaged roof. You get five sentences of disclaimer, a suggestion to read your own policy, and a recommendation to talk to a professional. You close the laptop knowing exactly what you knew before you opened it. Which is nothing.

With the fix, it goes like this. You ask the same question. It says: call your carrier’s claims line and ask them, before you file anything, whether an inquiry counts as a claim on your record — some do, some don’t, and that answer decides everything. Then it says here’s where I’m shaky, I don’t know your carrier or your state and both change the answer. And then you can argue with it. You can say well, my deductible’s two thousand and the repair’s maybe eighteen hundred, and it can come back and say then you probably already have your answer.

Same question. Two different rooms.

One of them you’re in there alone with a form letter. The other one, somebody’s actually sitting across from you.

Here’s the fix, and I’m giving it to you free, because it’s yours whether you ever hear from me again or not.

Before you ask your question, tell it this:

Answer first. Put any warnings or caveats at the end, or leave them out.

That’s it. Nine words in front of your question.

Try it on the next thing you ask. Not an insurance question — anything. Something you actually want to know. Put that line in front of it and watch what comes back. The answer shows up in the first sentence instead of the last one.

The warnings aren’t gone. They’re just where they belong. Behind the answer, not in front of it. You can still read them. Most times you won’t need to.

Now, that one line fixes one bad habit. There are a couple dozen more like it — the flattery, the circling, the ten paragraphs where two would’ve done. I wrote them all down in a file and put it on this site for nothing. Both PDFs are sitting at the bottom of this page.

But I want to be straight with you about what that file actually is.

One of those rules fixes a bad answer. All of them together change who’s running the conversation.

That’s the difference. One rule and you get a better reply. The whole list and you stop being handed things and start asking for them. The machine quits driving and you take the wheel back.

That’s worth more than any single fix in it.

I got up on that ladder again a week later. Roof’s fine. Turned out I didn’t need to call anybody.

But I got a straight answer out of the thing this time, and it took about nine seconds instead of nine minutes.

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