First of all, no it’s not. A hammer is a tool. There’s only one person responsible for taking it and making it useful: you. The fire department is not a tool. It performs a useful function which you can initiate, but it requires a complex chain of logistics which involves large amounts of resources and specially trained humans at every step to continue functioning. AI is a service.
Second of all, even if we accept that it is a tool, a jackhammer that has a specialized tip made from a rare material mined almost exclusively using slave labor which needs regular replacement and which runs exclusively on a smelly gasoline engine which everyone around you then has to breathe is not a tool “like any other” and using it is not a neutral act. When you use Claude, you are giving money and support to a company that buys, scans, and then shreds physical copies of rare books; scrapes independent websites until their servers give out, actively circumvents webmasters’ attempts to block them, and then lies about respecting opt-out signals; builds datacenters in disadvantaged areas that do everything from raising power bills and making power service less reliable for nearby residents to raising the temperature of places up to a mile away and producing inaudible infrasound that causes everything from irritability through hearing loss to siezures; powers those datacenters in part using natural gas turbines that produce significantly less electricity and more pollution than the same amount of natural gas in a natural gas power plant; and sells their technology to militaries which use them to design guided bombs.
And that’s before we even get started on what every single study on the cognitive effects of prolonged LLM use, even by trained professionals automating things they can do themselves, has revealed (in a sentence, use that muscle or lose it).
First of all, not giving them money is like pirating a Harry Potter show and then posting about how much you liked it on social media. You’re still giving it free advertising to people who will spend money on it.
Second of all, see what I said about the cognitive effects. If you don’t practice doing things without the AI, you will lose the ability to do them much more quickly than you think you will, and if you start relying on it to make tiny decisions, at best your work and at worst your thinking will slowly start to reflect the model’s biases.
More importantly, programmers who use LLMs to complete programming tasks demonstrate less complete understanding of their code, which is important because eventually you need to maintain it and even LLMs’ most ardent defenders admit that all of them are dogshit at software engineering. If you use AI to maintain an AI codebase, you’ll do great for a couple of months before it loses the ability to remember all the parts and starts duplicating work and not syncing up state with other components and before long it’s a buggy unmaintainable mess.