Is Your AI Hatred Aimed at the Hammer?
We Don't Blame the Hammer for the Wonky Cabinets
I spend a lot of my time reading and engaging with the Anti AI groups and message boards on social platforms. From my years as a software Product Manager, I'm a fan of knowing the competition. I believe that you can't build great products without understanding the contrarian opinion.
These days, my work focuses on the human elements of implementing AI rather than on the tech itself: like how AI makes people feel; both for those using it to drive a mission, and for the people being served by something that is, in part, driven by AI.
The latter is what I don't hear much chatter about in the anti-AI discussions, and it's where I think the whole conversation goes sideways.
We're spending too much time blaming the tool and not the tool users who are creating the final deliverables.
We don't blame the hammer for incorrectly installed cabinets; we blame the carpenter, right?
A perfect example is that of companies using AI chatbots as their only means of customer support. (I don't need to name any examples; you had at least one pop into your head before you finished that sentence.)
We get frustrated when the AI support agent can't understand our issue, when it refuses to refund the accidental double charge that happened on our coffee order last week, when it answers the support line and proceeds to walk us through a 15-step triage only to tell us that "Support has now moved online, please visit unicornco.xy/support for help," which then is handled by yet another AI bot.
It's maddening.
What's even more maddening is who we let off the hook.
Someone at a massive B2C company made the decision that all support would be handled by bots. The AI agents, in both senses of the word, didn't make that decision. I promise you, those agents would have been perfectly content not going into the office that day, not tasked with handling the work that a person just didn't feel like doing then, or every day thereafter.
And yet, we blame the tool as if it is singularly responsible for the way it makes us feel, as humans.
In truth, the hammer didn't hang the cabinets crooked. Someone chose the cabinets, chose the wall, chose not to measure, and rushed the job.
So why are we settling for companies that implement AI at the expense of humans, both the ones they're callously using AI to replace and the ones they're meant to be serving?
This is why AI is getting so much hate directed at it; it's being used by lazy companies to replace humans. Of course we, as humans, are mad at the tool.
In this example, the tool sucks. But that's on us, the humans. We allow companies that provide humans with key services to remove the humans from the equation entirely.
That's the real concern with AI, and it isn't an anti-AI sentiment; it's an anti-dehumanizing sentiment.
It's immoral at best and unsafe at worst.
I truly get, and to a certain degree agree with, the anti-AI crowd. But I would ask them, “Is the hatred directed at the hammer when it should really be directed at the carpenter?”
And if it's the carpenter, then the answer was never going to be banning hammers.
It's training better carpenters.
Did we use AI for this blog post? This was written by Alan Murphy, copyedited for grammar, flow, and story by Claude Code claude-opus-5.
