A large crop harvester is a tool, but if you used to work on a farm by hand it's not a tool you're going to get to use. It's a replacement for your labour and value, right? someone else will get to use the tool and earn money.

So the question is in what way ai is a tool to these kids.

The direct and unambiguous purpose of AI as a tool has been to replace labor and treat workers badly. This is not some doomsaying thing. This is literally what CEOs and billionares creating and pushing this shit have openly discussed and shared with reporters (who proceed to publish the quotes 100% uncritically and with no investigative sense of curiosity to ask further questions about it). They are excited at the idea that AI means they can cull millions and millions of jobs.

So, the people who are saying "it's just a tool" are trying to imply that it's just like an electric drill vs a hand drill, and all that will happen is that people will switch to the better tool and get much more productive and that's it!

Any maybe that's where we are today, but AI is rapidly improving and while we don't know what's going to happen there's very clearly a real possibility that instead of just people doing the same jobs but with a better tool, that tool will actually completely replace their jobs. Maybe a significant fraction of the jobs in society. That's no mere tool.

If I use AI to automate swathes of your field out of a job AI isn't the only tool.