Daniel JalkutAI is a tool. When the axe was invented, somebody probably said, "wow, I'm going to use this to cut so much wood!", and somebody else said "I'm going to use this to kill so many people!"
The best tools are hard to judge ethically.
Matt Massicotte@danielpunkass I do not believe that AI is a tool personally. But I think it is such a philosophical question that it might be just a distraction to debate it.
I attempted thoughts here:
Mindaugas Rudokas@mattiem @danielpunkass Not sure if philosophizing about the various possible colorings of the word “tool” is useful, but the tech did/does enable to create a lot of “things”, accomplish a lot of “goals”.
Tools cannot to be judged ethically, as they are inactive without an operator.
We can judge the quality of the tool. We do that a lot.
But when we involve ethics, even if we say “AI”, we are judging each other and arguing about our differences as human beings. That’s what’s happening.
@mrudokas @danielpunkass I don’t think that helping create/accomplish stuff is a factor unless you also consider humans tools
@mattiem I don’t see problems with wider meaning of the word “tool” than just hammers. If I’m hired, I’m somebody's tool to achieve something. Employees are tools. Army is a tool.
I even called into question my feel of English and opened a dictionary:
@mrudokas I just do not agree! But again, unsure if that matters or not.
@mattiem Regardless of the shades of English language interpretation, software definitely *is* a hammer. And I certainly do not understand how the cases of anthropomorphisation of LLMs happen, so the questions of comparison to anything-humans does not arise for me.