AI Is Not a Tool

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/your-ai-is-not-a-tool

by crowdhailer • 8 days ago

8 2 8 days ago

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

gnabgib• 8 days ago

From June? 6+2 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48637508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48722358

zahlman• 8 days ago

(I don't understand why people apparently object to this comment, but are also apparently unwilling to engage with it. I don't think I'm saying anything unreasonable and I think it's well within the envelope of other takes I've seen be well received around here; and I'm saying it sincerely after having thought about it.)

I confess that I am astounded by how blithely some insist that it is all as simple as learning to use AI well, as if we had not just undergone a nearly 20-year, society-wide experiment showing that a so-called “tool,” say a smartphone or a social media platform, will (mal)form even the most vigilant and virtuous user into its own image and shape.

Well, no; smartphones and social media platforms are clearly not tools, and were not "so-called tools" — as no reasonable person would have characterized them that way in good faith. At best they are used like appliances, not to empower the user's craft or allow for leveraging a skill, but for entertainment and convenience. At worst, they allow for others to manipulate you. There is no "virtue" to be found, and thus no benefit from "vigilance".

AI can at least plausibly assist the user with creating something new. The payoff of "learning to use social media well" is that maybe you don't get enraged by the views of others quite as often, or you figure out how to shut out the ads.

While there appears to have been a shift in the last 15 years or so in popular assumptions about the purported neutrality of technology toward at least the suspicion that our devices, etc. are not, in fact, merely neutral instruments at our command but rather frustrate, resist, or otherwise evade uncomplicated mastery by their users, such that their users might properly be said to be used in turn by their devices, it is nonetheless true that the myth of technological neutrality remains broadly entrenched.

This just seems like a strawman. It's conflating technologies that were "purportedly neutral" with ones that were not; it was never a universal attitude. Perhaps people thought that certain things would be not harmful on balance that turned out to enable quite a bit of harm, but that is not the same thing.

The rest of this is just... not convincing, and comes across as unfalsifiable. It adopts the reasoning frame that I cannot actually put forward evidence of not being "(mal)formed" by the AI, since that alleged influence would be the exact thing putting me (supposedly) in no place to judge what's going on.

AI Is Not a Tool

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