Article URL: https://www.frank.computer/blog/2025/05/just-a-tool.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930363 Points: 61 # Comments: 39

This post has garnered significant traffic to my blog as well as discussion on and offline over the last 10 months. For some google search queries (such as “ai just a tool”), this ranks in the top-2 search results consistently. So for folks finding this post, and my thoughts on the matter, I want to note that I’ve given a keynote on “tool-making” (which is the subject of my PhD) and I encourage you to read this blog and then consider watching the first 10 minutes (or so) of my talk. The introduction is a concrete walk-through of some of the ideas I discuss here in this blog. These two complement each other well: And I have also recently written more, about very similar problems, in terms of how modern generative AI influences prototyping, and threatens what prototyping should be about. So if you’re interested in further reading after this, consider checking out that post on genAI+prototyping. I’ve been thinking constantly about the common and casual phrase I’ve heard so often, “AI is just a tool - it matters how you use it.” This has been the rallying cry of tech-loving academics who no longer do their own research, tech bros who salivate over generative images of criminal depictions of people without their consent, and business-minded folks who actually don’t care about AI but see this as an opportunity to rake in more and more money for themselves. The phrase is deceptively simple and deceptively misleading. Yes, AI is a tool. And yes, it is important how we choose to use tools. But the phrase’s core reasoning is insultingly naive. It doesn’t work well for most things: “A car is just a tool, it matters how you drive it.” Well… oil and gas is destroying the climate, seatbelts help save lives whether or not someone is a good driver, and since the invention of cars, American city design has become utterly unwalkable and unlivable. So there is much more to tools than how we use them. And since I have seen this phrase used by award-winning, highly successful HCI researchers, I can’t help but wonder if some people really just want to shut up folks who disagree with them. Are these academics just afraid their ethics are being interrogated? Or do some people believe so strongly in the benefits of AI that they really don’t care for the downsides? I’m not sure why some cling so feverishly to this childish mantra that “AI is just a tool,” but I certainly lose respect any time I see someone who should know better use it. Have we not talked about how all artifacts have politics in our discipline for decades and decades? Tools are massively impactful on our environment, law, policy, and what it means to be human. Believing that AI is “just a tool” is naive at best and dismissive at worst because nothing about tools is “just” anything. They are highly complex parts of life and culture. The last part of the phrase, “it matters how you use it” is also deceptively misleading and overly simplistic. Oh really? The entirety of all ethics involved in modern technological ecosystems and infrastructures rests solely on how a singular person chooses to use something? Individual action won’t solve all of our problems. Some ethical issues are systemic and require more than just one person choosing the right method for using a piece of technology.