Yes, AI Is a Tool, but It Is So Much More

Pope Leo XIV recently asserted that artificial-intelligence technology (AI) is “above all else a tool.” Although such a phrase is often repeated and easily overlooked, Leo used it to clarify his stance opposing the many public exaggerations of AI’s potential for rivaling or exceeding humans in intelligence, personality, and agency. The Pope also took the opportunity to remind us that it is human persons who bear the moral responsibility for the appropriate design and use of technology.

There are other benefits to describing AI as just a tool. It helps to underscore the fact that most applications of AI are meant to improve our effectiveness and efficiency, in particular, job-related or pragmatic human tasks — not grand projects like Sam Altman’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of attaining superintelligence. In an environment of anxiety-generating rhetoric about a post-human future, the notion that “AI is a tool” can keep us grounded in the more ordinary reality.

Focusing on AI as a tool that is intensely oriented toward efficiency also encourages a critical appraisal of the dangers of AI for society. For example, will workers who hand over tasks to highly capable AI systems lose interest in their labor or simply be displaced? Will constant reliance on AI cause individuals to lose important thinking and decision-making skills? There are plenty of research studies which indicate that it will — for example, the article “ChatGPT Decreases Idea Diversity in Brainstorming” in the journal Nature Human Behaviour (June 2025).

We nevertheless risk great controversy and confusion if we fail to look beyond the characterization of AI as primarily, or simply, a tool. One danger is that we may fall into the rhetorical trap of many corporate leaders and AI engineers who hope to avoid moral judgment about the wide-ranging effects of their creations. The notion of AI as just a tool encourages this evasion of responsibility. Most tools, of course, are rarely considered to be good or bad in themselves; we hardly evaluate the goodness of hammers, vacuum cleaners, or even many weapons, because these tools simply obey the moral direction of the persons wielding them. The supposed neutrality of tools is often misapplied to the nature of complex and society-shaping tools like AI. A popular quote from the roboticist Rodney Brooks, for example, declares that “artificial intelligence is a tool, not a threat,” implying — without justification — that there is somehow a meaningful, consistent dichotomy between tools (neutral) and threats (bad).