If You’re So Intelligent, Why Do You Use AI?

A story about jealousy, fear, prejudice, and a question older than the machine

The question came across the table the way those questions always do, with a grin attached so it could be taken back later.

“If you’re so intelligent, why do you use AI?”

Teresa had heard it before, and she had never found a short answer that was also an honest one. She wrote grant proposals for a food bank in Suffolk County. The proposals were the difference between a pantry that stayed open through February and one that put a sign on the door. For two years she had drafted every one of them with a machine open on the second screen. The food bank had never been able to afford a grant consultant. For most of her career that gap had decided which proposals won and which came back with a polite letter. Her brother-in-law Dale built the air systems for hospitals, the ones that keep an operating room clean and a ward breathing. He had never typed a prompt in his life, and he said so often, with some pride.

She put her fork down and told him where it started. The honest answer was a story about people, and the machine was the least interesting thing in it.

It started in 1982, in a screening room, with a film called Tron. Steven Lisberger had put actors inside a world drawn by computers, and the people who saw it expected the Academy to recognize the visual effects. The nomination never came. The Academy nominated Blade Runner, Poltergeist, and E.T. that year, and E.T. won. Twenty years later Lisberger told SFGate what he believed had happened: “The Academy thought we cheated by using computers.”

Cheated. Only fifteen to twenty minutes of Tron were computer animation, and most of what the audience saw was built by hand with the older techniques. People did most of the drawing, and if Lisberger was right, the Academy saw a computer anyway. It had seen the tool and ruled on the tool, before the work was examined, which is what prejudice is once the costume comes off. The computer had touched the drawing, so the drawing could not belong to the artist. It did not occur to the people who held that view that someone had to decide what the computer drew, and that the deciding was the work.

Eleven years later the argument moved to a dinosaur, and this time it was fear. Phil Tippett had spent his career making creatures move one frame at a time, by hand. He was supposed to build the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park the same way. Then Steven Spielberg saw a computer-animated test of a Tyrannosaurus, and the hand-built plan ended in a screening room. Tippett told Spielberg he had just become extinct. By the time that sentence reached the screen it had passed through someone else’s judgment, the way everything in a film does. Grant says they are out of a job, and Malcolm corrects him to extinct.

Tippett’s sentence is fear said out loud by an honest man, and it is the most sympathetic thing in this story, because the fear was reasonable. The machine could do the thing he had spent his life doing. What the fear got wrong was what the work had been. Spielberg kept him on as Dinosaur Supervisor, with animation on fifty dinosaur shots under his direction. The machine could render a dinosaur, and Tippett knew how an animal carries its weight and how it turns its head when it hears something. His own explanation was plain: “The computer graphics guys weren’t film-makers.” Tippett’s shop and ILM built the Dinosaur Input Device, a stop-motion armature covered in sensors and wired to the computer. When his animators posed it by hand, the movement fed into the digital animal. The computer drew what it was told, and Tippett told it. In 1994 the same Academy gave the dinosaurs its visual effects award, and Tippett’s name was on it. The man who was supposed to go extinct evolved instead.

“You’re thinking about it too hard,” Dale said, “and I asked a simple question.”

“You asked the Academy’s question from 1982,” Teresa said, “and the dinosaurs answered it in 1993.”

She told him about the book. Stephen King wrote The Shining, and Stanley Kubrick read it and made the film he saw in it, in 1980. King hated what Kubrick saw. He hated it enough to write his own teleplay and produce a miniseries in 1997, directed by Mick Garris. To get Kubrick’s permission he had to agree in writing to stop criticizing Kubrick’s film in public. Same book. Two adaptations. One novelist, one director, and two completely different pictures of the same hotel.

“Nobody called either one slop,” she said. “They called one Kubrick’s and the other King’s, and both men had the same pages in front of them.”

“King wrote the book.”

“And Kubrick made the movie he saw in it, and King hated it enough to make his own. Each man took content that already existed, ran it through his own experience, and made the thing he saw. That’s what an adaptation is, and it’s what I do every morning with a draft.”

“A movie takes three hundred people and a year,” Dale said, turning the bottle a quarter turn on the arm of the chair, “and you type a sentence and hit enter.”

“And then I read what comes back and decide what stays.”

“That’s not work.”

“It looks like nothing from where you sit, and it’s the part you’re not counting. Last month it handed me a county hunger figure that was four years old and credited to the wrong agency. It never left my desk, because I knew the current number. The first month, I didn’t catch one. It went out under my name, and I found it when the program officer did. That proposal is forty pallets in January, and if I forward the wrong number, the pallets don’t come.”

“So the machine does the writing,” Dale said, “and you take the credit for it.”

“The machine does most of the typing. I do the deciding, and I get better at deciding every year I do it.” She let that sit. “You can’t say the same, because you’ve never started.”

“Here’s what you’re not saying,” he said, and he had stopped turning the bottle. “You knew the number because you learned it before the machine, and Tippett knew the animal before the machine. I’ve got apprentices who can run the diagnostic software and can’t hear a bad bearing through a wall.”

“So your shop runs on software,” Teresa said.

“That’s a tool. It reads a sensor and prints a number, and it doesn’t pretend to think for you. What about the kid they hire after you, who starts with the machine and never learns the number? What’s she checking against?”

“Nothing.” Teresa did not reach for the next sentence right away, and he let the word sit there before he added the part a foreman adds.

“And somebody built a system where that’s possible. So what’s the answer for the kid who starts with the machine, the one who never learns the number?”

“I don’t have one that fits on a bumper sticker.”

“Try.”

“You’re right about that one, and it’s the only part of this that scares me. The machine makes it easier to be lazy and harder to be good, and it doesn’t change what good is. The machine won’t build the judgment for her, and when she forwards something wrong nobody will blame the machine. They’ll blame her. Somebody has to teach her to check, the way somebody taught Tippett how an animal moves, and that was true before the machine. The machine made it urgent.”

The word slop had been in the room since the beginning, and Dale was the one who finally said it.

“They gave it the word of the year,” he said, “slop, and I heard it on the radio driving home from a guy who couldn’t stop laughing.”

“Merriam-Webster, and I read the page. ‘Digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.’ Produced in quantity. That’s the part worth reading twice, because it describes what happens when nobody is deciding, when the output goes out the door the way it arrived. A dinosaur rendered by someone who has never watched an animal move is slop. So is the adaptation nobody adapted.”

“The radio guy thought it was funny.”

“The dictionary noticed that too, and said the word ‘set a tone that’s less fearful, more mocking.’ Fear and ridicule are the two ways a person refuses a tool without ever picking it up.”

“There’s a test for it,” Teresa said. “If you cannot defend an AI output line by line to a skeptical expert, you have not authored it. You have forwarded it.”

“Half of what lands in my inbox is forwarded, and nobody needed a machine for that,” Dale said.

“Most of what you’re calling slop was forwarded. Nobody stood behind it, and that is a problem with the person, and it was a problem with people long before the machine showed up. Every office has a guy who forwards things.”

Dale laughed at that, because every office does, and for a second the grin came back.

“So the machine is a microphone,” she said, “and a microphone amplifies a message without being the message. Hand it to someone with nothing to say and it amplifies nothing, loudly. Hand it to Tippett and you get a dinosaur.”

“Your pantry has a condensation problem on the north wall, behind the shelving,” he said. “I walked through it in March, and the dehumidifier in there is sized for a room half that size. The cans on the bottom shelf will show rust by spring.”

She had not known that, and she said so.

“You’d have seen it if you knew what to look for, and that’s the whole thing I’m saying.”

He set the bottle down on the arm of the chair and did not pick it up again. He had watched her, over two years, stop apologizing for her job, and the explanation he could live with was that the machine had done it for her. The grin was gone now, and his voice dropped to the register he used when a system failed on his watch.

“Do you think that because you use AI and I don’t, you’re smarter than me?”

“Yes, but not simply because I use AI. Because I understand how to use it to expand what I can accomplish, while you seem to think refusing to use it proves something about your intelligence. And I understand why you don’t understand the difference.”

Nobody at the table said anything, and the grill ticked as it cooled. Dale looked at the fence for a long time, and the question stayed where it was.

Teresa heard her last sentence the way he must have heard it, and she ran her own test on it. It was true, and she could defend it line by line. It had also been easier to say than it should have been, and the ease was the part she did not like. She did not take it back. She let it sit there and cost her something, which he could see, and that is the only reason the evening survived it.

The question under his question was jealousy, the third of the old reasons and the quietest. It had been sitting in his hands the whole time he turned the bottle.

The difference is invisible from the outside. A person who directs the machine and a person who forwards its output look identical to anyone watching. Two people at a keyboard, two drafts on a screen. The direction happens in the judgment, in the shots Tippett sent back and in the numbers Teresa checked against the audited financials before a sentence left her desk. None of that shows on the page, though all of it is in the page, and a reader can only see it by knowing what to look for.

Dale could not see it because he had never done it, which is a description of experience rather than a verdict on his mind. He knew more about airflow than anyone at the table, and knowledge was never the thing in short supply. What he lacked was practice governing a tool he had decided not to touch. In the space where that practice should have been, the three old reasons had moved in. Fear told him the tool replaces the person who uses it. Prejudice told him the work was never hers once the machine had touched it, and jealousy, which never says its own name, told him her advantage was unearned. Each one feels like judgment from the inside, which is why refusing the tool felt to him like intelligence.

After a while she took out her phone, opened the proposal, and turned the screen toward him. Two paragraphs were flagged yellow where she had changed the numbers, and a third where she had thrown out a sentence that said nothing. He squinted at it for a while, and it looked like a proposal.

“I can’t see what you did,” he said.

“No, and that’s the problem with it, and it’s the same problem as your pantry wall.”

The machine is the newest thing in the AI story and the least important. The rest of it is the oldest story people have, about what happens at a table when the person beside you can suddenly do more. You either ask how, or you decide it must be cheating.

Dale picked the bottle back up, which was its own kind of answer.

“The miniseries wasn’t very good,” he said.

“No,” Teresa said, “but it was his.”

Sources

The people at the table are invented, and the history they argue about is real.

Associated Press. (2025, December 15). Merriam-Webster’s 2025 word of the year is ‘slop.’ Here’s why. KFVS. https://www.kfvs12.com/2025/12/15/merriam-websters-2025-word-year-is-slop-heres-why

Mental Floss. (n.d.). 15 facts about the ‘Tron’ franchise ahead of ‘Tron: Ares’. https://mentalfloss.com/article/83669/12-fascinating-facts-about-tron

Mental Floss. (n.d.). 18 things to look for the next time you watch Jurassic Park. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/547409/jurassic-park-things-to-look-for

Merriam-Webster. (2025). Word of the Year 2025: Slop. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year

Prop Store. (n.d.). Going extinct: Phil Tippett and Jurassic Park. https://propstore.com/blog/goingextinct/

vfxblog. (n.d.). The Dinosaur Input Device. https://vfxblog.com/dinosaurinputdevice/

Wikipedia. (n.d.). Phil Tippett. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Tippett

Wikipedia. (n.d.). The Shining (miniseries). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(miniseries)

Wikipedia. (n.d.). Tron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the story “If You’re So Intelligent, Why Do You Use AI?” about?

The story follows Teresa, a grant writer who drafts with AI, and her brother-in-law Dale, who refuses it, through one backyard argument. Three historical cases carry the argument: Tron in 1982, Jurassic Park in 1993, and the two adaptations of The Shining. The question, the story holds, is older than the machine.

Is AI content slop?

Merriam-Webster named slop its 2025 word of the year and defined it as low-quality digital content produced in quantity by AI. The story reads that definition as a description of output nobody decided on. Content a person directed and can defend line by line is authored, and content passed along unexamined is forwarded.

Why was Tron passed over for a visual effects nomination?

Tron received no visual effects nomination from the Academy for 1982, the year E.T. won. Director Steven Lisberger later said he believed the Academy thought the filmmakers cheated by using computers, even though only fifteen to twenty minutes of the film were computer animation and most of it was built by hand.

What happened to Phil Tippett when Jurassic Park moved to computer animation?

Tippett, a stop-motion animator, told Spielberg he had just become extinct when the computer-animated test replaced the hand-built plan. Spielberg kept him on as Dinosaur Supervisor over fifty shots, because he knew how an animal moves. In 1994 the Academy gave the dinosaurs its visual effects award.

Why did Stephen King make his own version of The Shining?

King disliked Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film enough to write his own teleplay and produce a 1997 miniseries directed by Mick Garris. To get Kubrick’s permission he agreed in writing to stop criticizing the film in public. The story uses the two adaptations to show that an adaptation belongs to the person who made it.

What is the difference between directing an AI and forwarding its output?

Directing means reading what comes back, deciding what stays, and checking it against what the person already knows, such as a current figure or an audited financial. Forwarding means sending the output out the way it arrived. The two look identical from the outside, and the difference lives in the judgment.

What do jealousy, fear, and prejudice have to do with AI?

The story names them as the three old reasons people refuse a new tool. Prejudice judges the tool before the work, as the Academy did with Tron. Fear expects replacement, as Tippett did. Jealousy reads another person’s advantage as unearned. Each one feels like judgment from the inside.

Basil C. Puglisi, MPA
A Human-AI Collaboration

#AIassisted using the HAIA Ecosystem | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Free for personal, educational, and noncommercial research use with attribution. Commercial exploitation, paid productization, and enterprise commercialization require separate permission and licensing.

#AIassisted