Why I Asked AI Instead of My Dad

My wife looked at me and uttered the words I most dread in our relationship: “When are you going to hang those frames?”

Pinned like the frantic rat I was, I looked for a limb to gnaw off to escape the trap.  Manage the children?  No, they were already in bed.  Pay the bills?  No, she knows that’s all automatic now.  Yelling “look over there!” and sprinting in the opposite direction?  No, I’d already used that to get out of folding laundry.

I accepted my fate and trudged into the hallway for my ritual humiliation.  I laid out the frames, my tools, and my dignity, then started measuring.

My father taught me a truism in my youth: measure twice, cut once.  I would offer a slight variation to that when it comes to hanging frames: measure as much as you want, it doesn’t matter.  Regardless of how I pin the measuring tape or how precise I make my marks, my frames inevitably have issues.  It’s never by much—a quarter inch here, an eighth of an inch there—but it’s enough to notice and slowly drive one mad.  I’ve lost sleep thinking of the set of three frames in my son’s room that are just slightly unleveled. 

I sat there and stared at all the materials, then up at the wall, then back to the materials.  There has to be a better way, I thought.  And as is usually the case in scenarios like this, my next thought was to call my dad and beg for his wisdom.  Being the all-around handy man that he is, I knew he’d have some trick to make me seem competent in front of my wife.

The phone was in my hand, finger swiping through my contact list, when I stopped.  I am a grown man, an adult in the eyes of the United States government, and someone who hundreds of thousands of people who are objectively more useful than me are legally required to salute.  It was time for me to man up and take this bull by the horns.

So instead of hitting dial, I swapped to an AI app on my phone and asked it for tips on hanging frames.

That’s how I learned the tape trick—slapping a piece of masking tape across the back of the frame, marking where the holes need to be, then putting it on the wall to use as a reference for your holes.  A few minutes later, the frames were up, my wife was happy, and I basked in the glory of my rugged frontiersman can-do spirit.

As I packed up my tools, I thought about how information gathering has changed for me over the years.  Asking parents for help.  Asking Google for help.  Asking an AI for help.  Each step got called progress.  I’m not sure that’s the right word.

To be clear, I’m not arguing with the results.  Those frames are dead-on straight, right where my wife wanted them.  I have not lost a wink of sleep haunted by a tiny imperfection that scrapes at my soul like a knock-off cheese grater on high-end parmesan.  The issue is wondering when I shifted my understanding of what it means to handle something.

One could argue that this is no different from calling my dad.  After all, he may have told me the exact same trick.  I think that misses the larger point, however.  Had I called my dad, there would have been other elements tied to the experience: the social interaction, the strengthening of a father-son bond, the inevitable shame my father would feel knowing his mid-30s son has six frames in his house right now that could be hung better.

What did I get when I asked the AI?  An answer, and a lack of friction.  I used to ask people who didn’t always have answers.  Now I ask something that always answers but can’t know me, no matter how well the math equations running under its hood pretend to.

There’s a decent chance I’ll remember the tape trick, but this may be the exception, not the rule.  I use AI for a wide range of efforts, from lesson prepping undergraduate level classes to working out what I actually think about strategy.  There are dozens of cases now where I just ask and get an answer.  I’m still lifting the box, but something else does all the work.  The sum of all those exchanges is quietly reshaping what I’m capable of—or think I’m capable of—without me noticing. I used to ask and get more than an answer.  Now I ask and get exactly that—an answer.  The frames are straight; no one can argue that.  But I still feel a sense of discomfort every time I look at them because now I have to wonder: what else have I quietly stopped asking?