AI is not “just a tool”
Brett argues that calling AI "just a tool" is a thought-terminating phrase that lets people dodge responsibility for what LLM products actually are: subsidized commercial services from companies making reckless claims, built on massive data-center and training costs. He contrasts LLMs with genuine tools like a power drill, Emacs, or Vim — things that do one task, don't degrade your skills, don't "sometimes make mistakes" by design, and whose makers don't publicly speculate about wiping out humanity. His ask is simple: stop using the phrase, because it justifies nothing and normalizes an unstable technology.
- The phrase "it's just a tool, it's how you use it" is used by developers, journalists, and tech organizers to avoid engaging with the complexity and harms of LLMs, including in debates like LLM-generated code in the Linux kernel.
- AI as currently discussed isn't a single artifact — it's an industry, a set of products, agents, and a massive expansion of data centers, plus features crammed into software that doesn't need them.
- A coding harness on a chatbot API is a paid product: the model will be retired, tokens are currently subsidized, and prices will rise once companies chase profit.
- Even running a local model doesn't escape the question of who trained it, with whose money, on whose data, and at what compute and environmental cost.
- A real tool is something people make or adapt for a specific task; a power drill is faster than a hand drill but its makers don't claim a greater-than-10% chance of ending humanity.
- A drill doesn't degrade a carpentry student's skills and doesn't come labeled "sometimes makes mistakes" — if it spun the wrong way you'd call it defective and return it.
- Vim and Emacs qualify as tools: made by people, for editing text, not industries, not resource-intensive, and typing "hack into this server" into a buffer commits no crime.
- Using these products signals demand for something whose harms society hasn't begun to measure, while the visible benefits — faster software, bad presentations — are minor.
The central analogy of the essay, laid out concretely: what an actual tool is and the four specific ways LLM products fail the comparison.
The leaders of those companies are not talking about how power drills and hammers and levels have a greater than 10% chance of wiping out humanity.
Pre-empts the most common counterargument by pushing the question back onto the supply chain behind any model.
But okay, you're using a local LLM model, but who trained that model? Where did the money come from to train it? Where did the data that it trained on come from? How much did it cost in compute and environmental resources?
AI is not just a tool. AI is an industry led by psychos.
My power drill does not sometimes make mistakes. That's not printed on the side of the power drill.
It justifies nothing. It means nothing. It helps no one.