The Journal
Essays on reading credentials before you pay for them.
The register gives you standings; the Journal gives you the reasoning. How to read a landing page, what a mark can and cannot carry, and what six hundred years of hallmarking quietly teaches about certifying people. Written by us, dated, and held to the same rule as everything else here: if we get something wrong, we say so, in the open, dated.
A Credential Is Not Compliance
The Journal · Reading time: 6 minutes Listen A credential is not compliance. Passing an exam proves a person studied a topic. It does not produce the record a regulator asks the organisation employing them to show. Article 96 of the EU AI Act does not ask a high-risk deployer to produce a certificate. It […]
Read it →Four Failures, Four Honest Disagreements
The Journal · Reading time: 8 minutes Listen Four failures, four honest disagreements. A B None of these four are stories about villains. Each is a real, documented system, a real harm, and a value someone chose over another value, in good faith, on a deadline. It is tempting to sort every AI failure into […]
Read it →Loophole Ethics
The Journal · Reading time: 7 minutes Listen Loophole ethics: why a code of conduct is not a person. THE GAP A written policy tells you what an organisation is willing to promise. It does not tell you what it does… the day that promise gets expensive. Past a certain size, every organisation writes one: […]
Read it →How to Read a “Certified AI Ethicist” Landing Page
The Journal · 3 Aug 2026 · six minutes How to read a “certified AI ethicist” landing page. The advertisement is real. The certificate is not, yet. The whole trick lives in the gap between those two sentences. Somewhere right now, a capable person is looking at a page with a shield on it. The […]
Read it →What Six Hundred Years of Hallmarking Can Teach AI Certification
The Journal · Reading time: 6 minutes Listen What six hundred years of hallmarking can teach AI certification. Six hundred years before anyone tried to certify an AI ethicist, London’s goldsmiths solved almost exactly this problem, for silver. In the 1300s, a buyer in London had no reliable way to tell a genuine silver spoon […]
Read it →Ethics Washing, and How to Actually Spot It
The Journal · Reading time: 3 minutes Listen Ethics washing, and how to actually spot it. A set of AI principles costs an afternoon and a designer. A mandate that can actually stop a launch costs a budget line, a reporting relationship, and someone willing to push forward. The gap between those two is the […]
Read it →When Your Role Spans Jurisdictions That Disagree
The Journal · Reading time: 3 minutes Listen When your role spans jurisdictions that disagree. A system built once and deployed everywhere does not get to obey one law. It has to satisfy the strictest applicable rule in every jurisdiction it touches, simultaneously, which is a harder engineering and governance problem than most organisations budget […]
Read it →Where do you actually stand?
Sixteen questions, six minutes. You rate yourself on each competence area, from "not yet" to "I could evidence this to an assessor". We hand back a profile, your strongest ground, and the gaps worth closing first. Nothing is stored unless you ask us to send it.