Is generative AI really 'just a tool'?

"AI is inevitable."

That's a phrase that's rattled around my head for a month. Not willingly mind you. It's taken up lodging in my grey matter after hearing it in meetings, reading it in emails, and seeing it buffeted back and forth across Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Discord.

It's not a convincing phrase. If you hear it from AI boosters it's easy to brush off as raw hype, and if you hear it from doomsayers it can lull you into a sense of fatalism. But as the philosopher Natasha Bedingfield told us in 2004, today is where the book begins, the rest is still unwritten. Nothing, for better or worse, is inevitable.

But in those various calls another phrase—one you may have heard at your studio—has slipped past more unnoticed: "AI is just a tool. It can be used for good or evil, like any other tool."

After all this is a business where we use tools for good or evil, right and wrong, correctly and incorrectly. We debate the effectiveness of Unity, Unreal, or Godot. We agonize over whether to use procedural versus hand-crafted content. We debate and discuss the topic so much that Game Developers Conference has a whole Tools Summit dedicated to craft of making game development software.

Viewing generative AI through the neutral lens of tool assessment is natural—and I'll go so far as to say admirable—for our community. It's a method we use to get past hype and bombast, to try and take technology on its own terms and see how it fits our purposes. And as the 2025 GDC State of the Industry report tells us, some developers are adopting generative AI, plenty of them not bought in on the hype but through the act of seeking the right tool for the job.

Related:Is NVIDIA's AI-driven NPC tech just really expensive improv?

But looking at generative AI as 'just a tool' is a deeply flawed lens. That phrase betrays a quiet cynicism (one we hear often from opponents of firearm regulation in the United Stats). Because nothing—not generative AI, not a firearm, not even a hammer—is "just a tool."

The function of tools is influenced by their form

Consider two tools found in many American households: the claw hammer and the handgun.

Normally Game Developer restricts itself to the craft of making video games but I promise this is relevant. Guns are another tool where neutralizing rhetoric is deployed to downplay a tool's negative effects. I grew up in a gun-owning house in a gun-owning neighborhood in suburban Maryland. There were probably four handguns sitting in lockboxes across two rooms, a few rifles and shotguns in a vault in the basement, and one questionably legal World War I firearm tucked away in a closet. The NRA's mantra of "guns don't kill people, people kill people" was commonplace. A neighbor of mine laughed when I advocated for stronger regulations on gun ownership on the basis of "guns are meant to kill." "Guns aren't meant to kill," I recall him saying. "Cars can kill people. Does that mean cars are meant for killing?"

His point boils down to this: The outcome of the tool's use is not worth considering when discussing regulation, only its potential use. A gun is a tool and the user has control over a tool is used.

Cars are already tightly regulated and cost thousands of dollars, making his point moot, so we'll break down the construction of the claw hammer instead. We generally refer to hammers as being used to pound nails into wood, but I mainly use mine for hammering anchors into drywall because I'm a theater kid and was taught in crew to trust screws.

In either case, the physical shape of the claw hammer dictates its most common purpose. The handle extends into a metal object that is blunt at one end, and clawed on the other. The design follows the swing of the human arm, transferring kinetic energy generated by the bicep, down the elbow, through the wrist, and into the blunt end.

We also know that claw hammers are not useful for every form of transferring this energy. Variations on hammer design like the ball-peen hammer show how this basic purpose needs to be altered for different tasks. The shape and the material changes depending on the purpose. To sell more hammers, companies invest in better materials and affordances like rubber grips to make their use more comfortable.

Like a firearm, hammers can be used as weapons. That same transference of force can be used to harm another living being. Video games sometimes place hammers in a players' loadout alongside guns, grenades, and weapons of war.

Neither the hammer nor the firearm is "just" a tool. They are tools that are optimized for a purpose. We can study that purpose, and cast judgements about a tool's safety, merits, and need to be regulated based on that.

But. The shape of the hammer is not an efficient way to inflict harm. This is supported by data from the FBI Crime Statistics survey, which gathers data filed by police departments that participate in assembling data. "Handgun" is the most common weapon used in homicides, and "knife/cutting instrument" ranks higher than "blunt objects." That's because handguns are an incredibly efficient means of wounding living beings.

Let's break down the handgun the way we did the hammer. Handguns are assembled from an assortment of components that transfer the squeeze of a trigger into the strike of a hammer against a firing pin, which strikes the primer of a bullet's cartridge and sends it propelling out of the tube. Though some bullets seen in larger firearms are meant to penetrate metal, a handgun's bullet is envisioned and designed to cut through flesh.

These constraints make handguns efficient at few other tasks. In a pinch you could use the butt of a handgun as a hammer. I can't find any data about them being used for that purpose. I can only wander onto a construction site and count the number of firearms in toolboxes as a general sample size.

Neither the hammer nor the firearm is "just" a tool. They are tools that are optimized for a purpose. We can study that purpose, and cast judgements about a tool's safety, merits, and need to be regulated based on that. Firearm advocates oppose this process through neutralizing language because it's difficult to dispute the correlation between the number of guns versus the number of murders and assaults with guns in a geographic area.

Generative AI proponents sometimes regurgitate that language when defending this new technology. Because like the gun lobby, they don't want the purpose of generative AI decided by its outcomes, only its potential.

What is that purpose? It may be the death of truth itself.

Generative AI is broadly used to deceive through mimicry

Generative AI is a tool for deception.

That's not what its biggest backers will tell you. It's broadly pitched as a tool for efficiency. But efficiency is hard to measure and easy to game. Deception is loud and obvious. Students are using it to cheat on papers. Scam calls with AI-generated voices are on the rise. The Department Human Health and Services published a study citing secretary Kennedy's unfounded health views that cites nonexistent studies, likely generated through AI. There was that cadre of YouTubers creating AI-generated fake movie trailers to attract clicks and make money off people who don't follow entertainment use. Apple marketed Apple Intelligence with advertisements showing people deceiving their neighbors, family, and coworkers. Activision Blizzard used generative AI to advertise games that don't exist.

Now here's the rub: games—and all of entertainment—are also a form of deception. We use the phrase "magic circle" to describe how we attract players into our worlds. We use camera tricks, rendering technology, and even VO barks to simulate digital worlds. People engage with games, film, TV, books, and especially magic shows because on some level they want to be not just deceived, but lied to. AI has also been sold as technology that will let every player make their own perfect experience tailored for them by generating worlds, visual assets, and audio on the fly. But the best pitches I've heard for AI tend to "hide" the presence of the LLM, only mildly asking the player for prompts in order to accomplish behind-the-scenes computing tasks. These lies can make shared realities, not wholly distinct ones.

That is the difference between telling lies to make virtual worlds and and telling lies to shape the real one. Lies in virtual worlds create shared realities. Lies in the real world tear them down.

How appropriate that one such "shared reality," the Star Wars show Andor, recently warned us about the price we pay with treating AI as "just a tool." "The loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous," said the character Mon Mothma in a climactic speech decrying the whitewashing of a carefully executed genocide.

"When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest."

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