Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 37 seconds
For YEARS now, I’ve been getting frustrated with people referring to AI as a “just a tool” and trying to explain why, no, Generative AI is really not “just a tool” in the same way other tools are tools. When you take a hammer and bang it on a nail, it will push the nail in the direction you give it. When you open an excel sheet and put in a formula to do a multiplication of two cells or an addition of 10 cells, it will do precisely what you tell it to do. When you decide not to use Excel, it will not come running after you. If you don’t pick up a hammer, it will not jump up at you. At best, Generative AI is like a swiss knife, but you can’t control which item within the swiss knife comes at you at any point in time, even with “careful prompting”. It also has hidden elements you don’t know, and you also can’t control whether it gets used on you, even if you choose not to use it yourself.
Anyway, reading this article yesterday by Abi Awomosu (thank you Theresa Destrbecq for quoting her in your post, which led me to the book How Not to Use AI) and then to Abi’s substack.
Though the article starts with why university graduates are booing praise of AI as the next industrial revolution, for me the main point of the article was explaining why AI is “not just a tool”. So many nuggets here, but here are a couple of quotes that I think are golden:
“That framing [of AI as a tool] is not just dismissive — it is the ceiling of what tool literacy can imagine. A tool is discrete. You pick it up, put it down, its function is fixed. A hammer drives nails. You are the agent. The institution that holds you both remains unchanged.
A medium-institution is something else entirely. It becomes the place where social, economic, and epistemic life happens. It sets norms. It creates gatekeeping. It arbitrates who gets to speak. It builds the archives that constitute collective memory.
A medium does not just carry content. It restructures who can produce, process, and act on information at scale. Television became the governing environment of 20th century politics — it didn’t just distribute political content, it restructured what politics was, who counted as a public figure, how power had to perform itself. Social media platforms are now de facto institutions of speech and visibility, running quasi-judicial moderation processes, setting the economic conditions for what is sayable and to whom. AI is completing the same move — becoming the place where knowledge gets produced, synthesised, and distributed at scale.
You don’t pick it up and put it down. You inhabit it, or it inhabits you“. (emphasis mine)
I think I need to go beyond my “No AI Shaming” post (as popular as it is), to something close to this:
“Somewhere between techno-pessimism and techno-optimism is the position this piece is arguing for. Not refusal. Not uncritical adoption. Literacy. Sovereignty. The capacity to engage deliberately with a medium you are already inside. To understand its grain, its tendencies, what it does to you when you engage without awareness. Rather than being used by it in either direction: enchanted into dependency or shamed into secret use.
Individual abstention inside a society already saturated with AI infrastructure functions more symbolically than structurally. The medium is infrastructural now. People are already inside AI-mediated systems whether they consciously use AI or not. The struggle shifts from avoid all contact to preserve agency under conditions of contact.
That is why literacy is resistance.” (emphasis mine).
I’ve said something similar to this whenever I mention no AI shaming in sessions. I say I respect the spectrum of AI resistance and enthuasiasm, and encourage this space to be one where we can listen to one another: for the enthusiasts to listen to the reasons for resistance and rejection, and for resistors to understand that AI may be beneficial to others despite ethical issues. But I also always qualify it with how, as educators, we cannot control the fact that students already have access to AI tools and are using them, as are workplaces. And we just need to be AI literate enough to make informed choices about how to teach now, in the presence of this ubiquitous technology. I continue to resistance an “AI inevitability narrative” in the sense that AI is not inevitably going to be forced on us in education; we have agency to not let it take over, and it is not an inevitable good. However, it is inevitably something that exists in the world and young people are using it. In the same way that social media was something students were using, whether we liked it or not, but we were never told we HAVE to integrate social media into our assignments and get on it and encourage its use, you know? But if we were teaching a subject like marketing or journalism, we couldn’t like pretend that social media was not being used in the workplace, right? The AI analogy is a bit bigger because it’s sort of infiltrated many more fields and there are so many different manifestations of AI (not all of it GenAI) that are both general and specific to disciplines/fields.
Another thing I came upon yesterday that is worth sharing is Taz Daniel’s Faculty Critical Engagement with AI pyramid. I’d been wanting to design something like this and now I’m going to use hers! Basically, what I like about it is that the pyramid’s bottom is the person who is unintererted, skeptical or overwhelmed, but goes on up to a level of learning and experimenting, and then branches out. Because as you become more aware, you may choose one of two broad directions: informed integration or informed restraint. What I love about this model is that many other models always always always consider the more “advanced” levels to be necessarily about integration rather than restraint. This one resonates more. The highest levels are “shaping use” and “shaping limits”. This is how I think we need to think about a critical engagement with AI – the refusal right alongside the adoption as informed, critical choices once you become informed and you’ve learned enough. Not uncritical adoption and enthusiasm, but also not unaware kneejerk rejection. Check it out on her website.
Both of these are things I’m going to use a lot going forward!
Featured image of forest trees from the bottom by Nick_the_Photographer from Pixabay – it kind of represents being surrounded and feeling overwhelmed, but also seeing the sun and sky and a potential way out.