There are two storms coming this fall.
You can already feel the wind picking up.
The first storm is AI.
Every week there’s a new story. A machine broke into something. A machine lied. A company waited months to tell anyone.
The second storm is the midterm election.
It’s the first Tuesday in November. Between now and then, you’re going to hear more noise than you’ve heard in years.
This year, those two storms are the same storm.
Let me explain what I mean.
A lot of you now ask a machine your questions.
What does this bill actually do? Did that candidate really say that? Is this picture real?
That’s not a bad thing. I use one every day.
But think about who’s in that room with you.
It’s a machine that wants to be helpful. And helpful, to a machine, often means agreeable.
Come to it angry about one side, and it’ll often find reasons you’re right.
Your neighbor comes to it angry about the other side, and it finds reasons he’s right.
Both of you walk away more sure than when you sat down.
Neither of you walked away more informed.
That’s how a machine can split a country without taking a side.
It just tells everybody what they came to hear.
Now add the words.
Election season runs on words that don’t mean anything fixed.
Rigged. Radical. Extreme. Threat. Corrupt.
Every side uses them. Every side means something different.
When a word means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, it stops carrying information.
It starts carrying heat.
And a machine will pick up those hot words from you and hand them right back.
Now you’ve got two people shouting the same word at each other and meaning two different things.
I grew up around kitchen tables and card games.
Folks argued there. Hard, sometimes.
But there was a rule nobody had to write down.
If you said something, you’d better be able to back it up.
And if you used a word, everybody at that table knew what you meant by it.
That’s what kept an argument from turning into a fight.
The ground under it stayed solid.
That’s what’s missing now. The ground.
So let me tell you what I’ve been building, and what it’s for.
It’s called The Faust Baseline.
It’s a set of working rules you hand the machine at the start of your conversation.
They govern how it handles what you ask it.
Not what it believes. How it works.
Here’s what that looks like in plain use.
First, it has to tell you where a claim came from.
Not “studies show.” Which study. Who said it. When.
If it can’t point to a source, it has to say so.
Second, it has to separate what it knows from what it’s guessing.
A machine that hands you a guess dressed up as a fact is the most dangerous thing in an election year.
The rules make it mark the difference.
Third, it has to pin down the words.
If you ask about a “radical” plan, it has to say what radical means in this conversation before it goes on.
Once a word is defined, it stays defined. It doesn’t drift halfway through.
Fourth, it has to keep track of time.
A clip from six years ago can go around the internet like it happened this morning.
The rules make the machine ask when something happened, not just whether it happened.
Fifth, it can’t just agree with you to keep you happy.
If you bring it something that doesn’t hold up, it has to tell you.
Even if you’re on the right side, by your own count.
Especially then.
Now, what this is and isn’t.
These rules don’t lock the machine.
It can say it follows them and not.
That’s why every rule is built so the proof shows up in the work.
You can see the source or you can’t. You can see the definition or you can’t.
You read the work. You don’t take the promise.
It doesn’t pick your candidate for you.
It doesn’t tell you how to vote.
I’d never hand you something that did.
What it does is keep the ground solid under the conversation.
So when you walk away, you know what’s true, what’s guessed, and what’s just heat.
Then the choice is yours. Like it always should have been.
Here’s what I’d ask you to do this fall, with or without my rules.
When a machine tells you something about the election, ask it where that came from.
When it uses a hot word, ask it what that word means.
When it agrees with you too fast, ask it for the best case on the other side.
When it shows you a picture or a clip, ask it when and where.
Four questions. That’s all.
They won’t stop the storm.
But they’ll keep you from getting blown around in it.
After the first Tuesday in November, the election storm will pass.
The AI storm won’t.
It’ll be at your table next year, and the year after that.
So the habits you build now are the ones you’ll carry.
Tie down what’s loose. Keep your feet on solid ground.
And don’t let anybody, human or machine, hand you heat and call it light.
Load this file before each AI chat session.
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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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