The Mantra That Shuts Down Debate

Frank Elavsky, a PhD candidate whose dissertation centers on tool-making and accessibility, has had enough of the phrase, "AI is just a tool — it matters how you use it." In a blog post that has consistently ranked in the top-2 Google results for "AI just a tool" since 2025, he dismantles this seemingly harmless platitude.

"The phrase's core reasoning is insultingly naive," Elavsky writes. He points out that even a hammer requires laws about worker treatment, mining, and sustainability. "'It matters how you use it' ignores the reality that it also matters how AI is made, how AI is disseminated, the waste AI produces, the damage AI causes to economies and environments."

Tools Have Politics — Always Have

Elavsky invokes the well-established HCI principle that "all artifacts have politics." He cites Heidegger's concept of Gestell ("en-framing"): technologies shape who we are by their design. A chair orders you to sit still, face forward, and behave. AI, he argues, does the same — but more insidiously.

"Artificial intelligence, far more than any tool we've ever created, intends us not just to sit forward and behave, but to cease to think critically, to cease to imagine, and, most temptingly, to cease to feel struggle and pain."

The Environmental and Economic Costs

Elavsky doesn't mince words on the concrete harms of modern AI: "Modern AI agents have accelerated climate change and come at an immense cost to our already precarious world." He cites the theft of data as "the largest heist in human history" — scraping everything from every corner of the digital space without consent. The economic model is built on extraction, both of data and of natural resources.

Drudgery vs. Meaningful Struggle

The post draws a line between drudgery (like climbing a curb, which accessibility efforts rightly eliminate) and meaningful struggle (like climbing a mountain). AI, Elavsky argues, flattens all struggle into a drug-like numbness. He quotes Hayao Miyazaki: "If life's hassles disappeared, you'd want them back."

"We don't need to write our mothers a well-meaning email on her birthday, we don't need to make the case for our promotion to our bosses, we don't need to think through the hard parts of an algorithm we are writing... We simply prompt."

What Developers Should Actually Do

Elavsky's dissertation offers a broader call: interrogate how tools shape us. For developers, this means:

  • Audit the AI tools you integrate — what data were they trained on? What environmental cost?
  • Push back against solutionism that reduces ethics to "good usage."
  • Design tools that enhance human struggle (like safer weightlifting machines) rather than eliminate it.

He concludes that "AI agents (as the corporate-controlled transformer and diffusion based models of our modern day) are largely bad to use, especially now, and in most all contexts." But he leaves room for hope: policy and better tech could make AI sustainable someday.

A Call to Reject the Mantra

Elavsky's post is a sharp reminder that phrases like "just a tool" are rhetorical weapons that shut down ethical debate. For developers building with or around AI, the challenge is to see the full system — from data theft to water usage to the erosion of critical thinking. As he writes, "We have the power and the responsibility to make our technologies shape humanity into something good and meaningful."