Jon Dron prefaces his argument with a discussion of what counts as a tool ("something that an intelligent agent does something with in order to do something to something else") which seems not quite right (are elephants 'intelligent agents'? is a 'pen and paper', thought of as a system, not a tool?) but which does the job, which is to get us to the essence of the argument, which is this: "The big problem with treating generative AIs as tools is that it overplays our own agency and underplays the creative agency of the AI." Specifically, "It encourages us to think of them, like actual tools, as, cognitive prostheses, ways of augmenting and amplifying but still using and preserving human cognitive capabilities, when what we are actually doing is using theirs." Yes, non-humans - including animals and now machines - have cognitive capacities.
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