With the emergence of AI and its criticism, the "Just a tool" argument is often used as a justification against nefarious uses of the technology. I think this argument fundamentally misses what human creativity is.

The argument states that technology, in particular AI, is just a tool and thus, it can be used to pursue either good or bad outcomes. The effects that technology has on people's lives are then merely dictated by the intentions of its users. My problem with this argument is that it implies that tools just are, that they exist in the universe in the same way that water exists, as a part of nature that emerged independently from human societies; instead of understanding them as something that a group of people decided to put into the world. By doing so, it removes those people from the picture, those who conceived the tool, who designed it and built it. Under this framework, it's the user and only the user who's responsible for any outcomes or ramifications the tool may lead to.

Tools are political

What do you think politics is? How would you define what constitutes someone's politics? I would say that it's the combination of two things, how they think the world works and how they think it should work. Under this definition, every human creation must be political, there's no alternative; how could anyone create something that is completely independent from their understanding of reality? Furthermore, when one brings something into existence, particularly a tool, we do it with a goal in mind, a problem we want to solve. This goal must be political, there's no other way of determining which goals are worthy, which problems deserved to be prioritized, or what constitutes a problem in the first place, than to exercise a political judgment.

Things get muddier when you consider that tools may not be developed by a single person, but by groups of people who themselves are part of larger institutions. Each of these actors will have different politics and the resulting tool will be affected by all of them, though not necessarily in equal parts.

Let me illustrate all of this with a concrete example. If you want to build something, e.g., a chisel, you may choose to build it in the cheapest way possible, or you may choose to source the finest materials from local producers and use robust techniques, you may even try to achieve some middle-ground. No matter what you decide, that is a political choice, you are choosing what you believe is important. To be clear, there's no way around this, even if you strictly follow economic criteria and disregard everything else, choosing that as your only metric is a political determination. To put it more succinctly, creating something requires making choices and those choices are political.

Biases are choices we don't notice

Now imagine this: Someone, let's call them Bob, wants to create the perfect pair of scissors. They design them thoroughly, try a lot of different prototypes and send them to some of their friends for testing. After numerous iterations, Bob comes up with an impeccable design. Bob is overjoyed with their new scissors and starts proudly sharing them with people in their life until, one day, a neighbour tells Bob that they tried the scissors but found them completely useless. This neighbour was left-handed. Now, did Bob decide to make their scissors exclusively right-handed? Not consciously, but their worldview (and thus their politics) drove them to go through the entire design process without once considering the existence of left-handed people. Our biases affect the final tool as much as the choices we intentionally make.

The downstream effects

The politics of a tool aren't just intellectual ideas divorced from our material reality, they affects how the final tool will be used and by whom. Proponents of the "Just a Tool" argument will use examples like "A hammer can be used either to drive a nail into a piece of wood or as a weapon", the implication being that both of these uses are equal in some sense and it's up to us to choose. This idea completely ignores two basic facts. First, it overlooks that hammers are designed with a goal in mind, namely, to to hit nails. Second, and even more egregious, it neglects the fact that that's how they are actually used; most hammers most of the time are used in the way they are designed to be used and the "Just a tool" argument pretends that this is just a coincidence. The whole point of the design process is to steer the ways in which a tool is used.

Going back to AI, the "Just a Tool" argument wants us to evaluate the technology without considering who built it in the first place, what their goals may be, what resources they used to develop it or why they were allowed to use such resources, as if those points were unrelated to the impact of AI in our world. This reasoning is completely backwards, like trying to predict what target an arrows will hit by analysing the construction of the bow while ignoring who is holding it and what they are aiming at. We must not only consider the politics of AI, but place them front and center during any serious analysis of the technology.