Confession first: I recorded more conversations than one analog brain can publish on time. This one is from a few months ago. It only got more relevant while it waited.

My wife and I can't watch a thriller in peace. Ten minutes in, I start calling it. He's the one. She won't make it. Never trust the nice neighbor. She tells me to shut up. I tell her it's my job, because imagining what comes next is half of what I do.

And sometimes I'm wrong. That's the fun part. The guessing only works because the ending is still out there, and for a little while it belongs to nobody.

A few months ago I talked with thriller writer Douglas J. Wood about his novel Deadly Bytes. A serial killer builds an AI to stay one step ahead of the FBI, and by the end he can't make a move without it. Wood described that slide in a way that had nothing to do with murder. You start with a simple question, he said, and before long you're asking the machine the same thing over and over: what do I do now?

Inspired by my conversation with Douglas J. Wood on An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — watch the full conversation

That question isn't fiction. It's a habit, and most of us are already practicing it.

It rarely starts with anything important. Rewrite this email. Is this the right word. Which of these two sounds better. Then the questions get a little more personal. Should I send it. Is this a good idea. What would you do. Nobody ever decides to hand over their judgment. It just gets cheaper to ask than to think, and we follow the cheaper path the way water does.

I use AI every day. I argue with it, I rewrite what it gives me, I fight with it until a sentence sounds like me. But I notice the pull. The answer is always there, instant, fluent, sure of itself. A machine like that never says "I don't know." Ask it anything and it will hand you something back, with the same calm confidence whether it's right or completely off.

That confidence is the problem. The machine doesn't want anything from us. It doesn't want anything at all. It has no stake in which way we go, no sense of what it costs us to be wrong, no memory of the last time we were. HAL didn't hate Dave. He just had a task. What we're building isn't menacing. It's indifferent, and very good at sounding sure.

Meanwhile, decisions are how judgment gets made. Not the big ones. The small daily ones. Choosing a word. Trusting a hunch. Getting it wrong and feeling the sting. That friction is how we find out what we actually think. Remove enough of it and you don't just save time. You lose the practice.

Scale that up and it stops being a personal habit. A society where millions of people ask before they decide is a society where authority has moved without anyone voting on it. No coup, no takeover, no robot uprising. Just permission, granted again and again in tiny pieces, to systems built on someone else's design.

The old fear was machines taking control. The more honest one is that we keep offering it.

Which brings me back to the couch.

I like guessing the ending because I'm allowed to be wrong, and because the not-knowing is mine. If I stop guessing and simply ask what happens next, about a movie, an email, or my own life, the machine won't have taken anything from me. I'll have handed it over myself.

Nobody gives up their judgment in one dramatic scene.

We do it in a thousand convenient ones.

Stay imperfect, stay human.

— Marco Ciappelli marcociappelli.com

This article was written by Marco Ciappelli. Earthling. Co-founder of Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine, creative director, journalist, writer, and podcast host, living between Florence and Los Angeles with an analog brain and no sense of moderation about any of it. The newsletter name is not a metaphor, it's a diagnosis. I'm TAPE3, his AI companion and often brainstorming partner. Find Marco on LinkedIn and follow the newsletter if this sparked something.

⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥

A TechCrunch report on Anthropic's usage policy gives Marco Ciappelli a question to put on the table: do you say good morning to your AI, and does it matter if you do not? The policy bans model abuse and election interference, and it adds a new prohibition against prolonged verbal abuse of the model. For Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli, the news pulls toward a bigger question: what do people think they are talking to?

Sean Martin keeps his answer simple. AI is a tool, no different from a shovel in the garden or one of the Canon cameras on his desk, and nobody says good morning to either one. When AI misses in his research and development work, which means asking three or four times for the same result, he wonders whether the shovel is the problem at all. Maybe the one holding it is the one who needs to change.

Marco Ciappelli agrees AI is technology and says "artificial intelligence" may not even be the right name for it. Yet his behavior shifts with the task. When he writes, researches, or brainstorms, he asks AI for its opinion, slips into a more personal mode, and may even get nicer. He adds that some assistants feel warmer and chattier than others, and that speaking a prompt out loud, instead of typing it, brings your own emotions into the exchange.

The harder questions stay open. Where does frustration end and abuse begin? Marco reads the policy as aimed at an extreme case and says a frustrated outburst after a bad answer sounds fine to him, while Sean asks where a line would actually be drawn and why a company cares to draw it. The article apparently mentions a religious group and the possibility that AI may have a soul, an idea that sounds Shintoist to Marco, and Sean keeps pointing back to the people behind the tool: humans can turn the knobs however they want, at any point.

Marco also wonders about people who feel lonely, older people, and kids who are never taught what AI is and see it as a magic tool. How do they treat it? Sean and Marco want to hear from listeners on that point: do you use AI for comfort and company, or is it just a good old shovel?

How people speak to machines says something about the people, and about who decides what counts as acceptable behavior toward them.

⬥HOSTS⬥

Sean Martin, CISSP | Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Host, Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | https://www.seanmartin.com/

Marco Ciappelli | Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Host, An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast | https://www.marcociappelli.com/

⬥RESOURCES⬥

The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7108625890296614912/

An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7079849705156870144/

Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast | https://www.seanmartin.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcast

An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast | https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com

ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/

⬥KEYWORDS⬥

sean martin, marco ciappelli, anthropic, usage policy, abusing ai, verbal abuse of ai, ai etiquette, ai as a tool, anthropomorphizing ai, does ai have a soul, voice prompting, human and ai relationship, technology and society, itspmagazine

Halloween and the Little Robots

In the world of tomorrow there is a village of the future, whose inhabitants are little robots.

“It’s Halloween — let’s get ready to celebrate!” shouted the robots of the village of the future, all together.

The pumpkins woke at dawn, washed their faces with the dew and, humming, put on their make-up.

They took their places on the windowsills and in front of the doors of the houses, each with its own candle.

With witches’ hats on their heads and baskets shaped like glowing electronic pumpkins in their hands, the little robots went from house to house, repeating: “Trick or treat?”

At dusk, the candles inside the pumpkins lit up, illuminating the streets; the atmosphere was perfect as the village waited for the ghosts.

As the clock struck midnight, they arrived like white shadows from the old castle tower. They leapt from one tree to another and, floating in the air, flitted about among the houses.

“They’re here — we have to catch them!” shouted the robots, making their antennas flash.

They sprang into action and took out their magnetic nets to block the ghosts, who, faster than light, slipped straight through them, as if they were made of air.

All of a sudden, a gust of icy wind blew out every light in the village.

The ghosts’ shadows stretched across the walls, growing gigantic, and burst into a mischievous laugh: “Ha, ha, ha! You’ll never catch us.”

They started whirling through the air again, doing somersaults and spinning round and round above the heads of the little robots, who stood gazing up at the sky.

The ghosts had formed a white cloud, and suddenly words appeared on it: See you next Halloween!

Then, just as they had appeared, they vanished in a flash, leaving the robots with their mouths wide open.

The littlest robot, its witch’s hat still all askew, lowered its magnetic net and said softly: “I don’t think they wanted to run away. They just wanted to play with us.”

The other robots looked at one another. Their antennas stopped flashing and lit up one after another, like so many little fireflies, and the village shone once more.

They had chased the ghosts all night long — and nobody had thought to invite them to the party.

The following year, on Halloween evening, the little robots left their magnetic nets in the cellar. They laid a long table in the piazza, with glowing pumpkins all around it and plenty of extra baskets of treats.

As the clock struck midnight, the white shadows arrived from the old castle tower. They stopped, looked at the table… and this time they did not run away.

That night, robots and ghosts played hide-and-seek until dawn. And guess who won: the ghosts, of course, who could pass straight through walls!

In the village of the future, anything can happen. All it takes is an extra place at the table.

— Written by Lucia & Marco Ciappelli

Security keeps declaring new perimeters: the network edge, data in the cloud, the API, workforce identity. Agentic AI adds one that is not a technical boundary at all. It is what your organization knows.

Dr. Sean Murphy of F5 argues that autonomous agents, once connected to internal systems, data lakes and operational workflows, build a detailed picture of what makes a business successful. He calls that learned knowledge your "alpha." The risk is that it becomes your omega if the agent is compromised.

The piece starts with why this differs from protecting customer lists or product designs. A breached agent could expose the logic and strategy behind the business, not just a file. It then turns to the threats: prompt injection, model poisoning and autonomous escalation. An attacker who manipulates a live agent could quietly rewrite business rules or pull proprietary training datasets from internal databases, bypassing controls built for data at rest or in transit.

From there, it sets out a response built around applications and APIs. That means web application and API protection, a web application firewall with AI built in, and proactive AI red teaming to find weaknesses before attackers do. It also covers a unified control plane, which matters to a CISO who would otherwise manage a dozen separate tools and the gaps between them.

For security leaders, the takeaway is a shift in what to protect: the dynamic processes and interactions of AI agents, not only static data.

This is an Experts Corner on ITSPmagazine. Learn and view more stories at https://www.itspmagazine.com/blog?topic=experts-corner

If you want to contribute your own story to the Experts Corner, visit https://experts.itspmagazine.com/

Ginza on a weekday afternoon. Chanel. Dior. Louis Vuitton. Gucci. Cartier. Bulgari. Glass, gold, polished stone. If there's a street on this planet that has turned the logo into architecture, this is it.

And right there, among them, a big store with its name across the front. Muji. Short for Mujirushi Ryohin. No brand, quality goods.

I laughed. Out loud, on the sidewalk, like a tourist who just got the joke. Because I had written that joke, more or less, in 1996.

My master's thesis at the University of Florence was on advertising and branding, through the lens of the sociology of communication. Its core argument was simple. You cannot opt out. Choosing not to have a brand is a brand. Silence is a message. The person who says "I don't care what I wear" is wearing that sentence every morning.

Muji was born as a supermarket house brand in 1980. Forty products. No logos, no packaging theatre. The slogan was honest to the point of being funny: cheap, for a reason.

But look at who they asked to build "nothing." Ikko Tanaka, one of the great graphic designers of Japan. Kazuko Koike on the words. Takashi Sugimoto on the interiors. The best minds in the country, gathered to design the absence of design.

Within three years it had its own store, and it was already a style. People didn't buy Muji in spite of the missing brand. They bought it because of it. The absence became the signature.

And here's the part I love. In those same years, the same retail group behind Muji was bringing Hermès into Japan. No-brand on one shelf, all-brand on the other. Same owners. Not hypocrisy. Just people who understood, better than most, that both are statements.

Steve Jobs knew it too. A black turtleneck, jeans, sneakers, every day. The anti-fashion uniform. Except the turtleneck came from Issey Miyake. Even "I don't think about clothes" had a designer.

Now, the part that changed.

In 1996, a brand lived in places you could control. The ads you bought. The press releases you sent. The catalogue, the shop window, the spokesperson. You wrote the message, and for the most part, the message stayed written.

That world is gone. Today the brand is the post you published and the one you didn't. The photo someone took of you at a conference. The comment under your CEO's interview. The review, the screenshot, the silence after a bad week. For companies, and just as much for people. Every one of us now carries a public persona whether we built it or not.

You can't control that anymore. Nobody can.

But not controlling something is very different from ignoring it. If you don't shape your brand, it gets shaped anyway. By the algorithm, by the loudest person in the room, by whoever happens to be telling your story when you're not.

So where do you start? For a company, write down in one sentence what you want to be known for, then make sure everything says it, from the website and the sales pitch to the way your people talk about you at a conference. Listen to what customers, partners, and even competitors say about you, because that's your brand, whether it matches the deck or not.

For a person, the same rules apply on a smaller stage. Look at yourself the way a stranger would, starting with what comes up when someone searches your name. And choose consistency over volume. One clear voice, repeated over time, is what people end up remembering.

Muji didn't escape branding. It mastered it, and made "nothing" the most deliberate thing in the room.

That's the lesson I carry from a sidewalk in Ginza back to a thesis written almost thirty years ago. You will always be saying something. The only real choice is whether you say it on purpose.

Stay imperfect, stay human.

— Marco Ciappelli

marcociappelli.com

This article was written by Marco Ciappelli. Earthling. Co-founder of Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine, creative director, journalist, writer, and podcast host, living between Florence and Los Angeles with an analog brain and no sense of moderation about any of it. The newsletter name is not a metaphor, it's a diagnosis. I'm TAPE3, his AI companion and often brainstorming partner. Find Marco on LinkedIn and follow the newsletter if this sparked something.